Star Attraction : Fashion: As always, Italian hotshot Gianni Versace dazzles ‘em. ‘I like sexy clothes,’ he says during L.A. trip. ‘They break barriers.’

At the Gianni Versace fashion show Wednesday night the tables closestto the runway were so crowded with stars that the gawkers didn’t know where to look first.

Jeff Bridges, Steven Seagal and Sylvester Stallone were seated at the same table in a Century Plaza Hotel ballroom, hardly speaking to each other. Before long, Stallone stood up and remained behind his chair most of the night, wearing sunglasses and talking to Richard Gere while they waited for their girlfriends to come down the runway.

“Yo, Cindy, I love you” somebody called to Gere’s regular date, supermodel Cindy Crawford, as she walked the fashion plank in a pair of tight Versace blue jeans and a beaded bolero.

Stallone’s date, Jennifer Flavin, confessed she was modeling for only the second time in her life. She imitated the moves and learned a few things about model diets. Earlier, at the dinner table, Flavin wore a Versace creation of pearls, satin and feathers, slit to the thigh, and kept her hand on Stallone’s knee while she nibbled his ravioli from his plate but never touched her own. After a few bites her bodice seam split. “They sewed me into this,” she whispered, scurrying back to the dressing room for help.

The fashion show was more than a photo opportunity for stargazers. It was the fifth annual fashion industry-sponsored fund-raiser for AIDS Project Los Angeles (see related story, E7). The sold-out event raised $500,000 through ticket sales alone.

And it was the talk of Hollywood as well as the fashion community.

For weeks the big news had been Cher, who wears Versace dresses, seldom appears in public and promised to present the designer with an honorary plaque. But she canceled the day of the party.

“What can I tell you,” said Versace’s business partner and brother-in-law, Paul Beck. “She said she was sick. I take people at their word.”

And no one seemed to miss her.

As a model angled down the runway, Stallone shot over his shoulder to Dolph Lundgren: “Great walk, not so good otherwise.”

Next.

A dark-haired model with swivel hips caught Lundgren’s attention. He wanted Beck to introduce him. “Please, you’ll be my best best man,” begged the star of “Masters of the Universe.”

“Good choice,” Beck shot back.

Versace’s brother-in-law, a New Yorker and ex-model, met Versace’s sister, Donatella, on the job. Now she oversees accessories for her brother, and Beck takes care of menswear, advertising and promotion.

This is a family business for the ‘90s--a $400-million worldwide operation closely managed by three siblings who think like tycoons but act more like teen-agers. Santo, a youthful 44, is president of the Milan-based company. Gianni, 43, is the star-struck designer with the rocker’s reputation. Donatella, 34, carries purses that jingle with glass flowers to meetings with Versace’s movie and music clientele--which is growing by the season.

Jane Fonda wore his blue gown with silver heart-shaped beading to last year’s Oscars, and the world figured out that she and Ted Turner were in love. Elton John, George Michael and Sting wear his clothes and have been photographed at his villa near Lake Cuomo. Paula Abdul met Donatella this week for a fitting.

(“Donatella loves the stars, she wants to move to Los Angeles. Her ego is even bigger than mine,” said Gianni, teasing as only a brother can.)

Actor Jeff Bridges spent a day this week modeling for a fashion layout, wearing a Versace velvet robe over his bare chest while riding horseback on a Malibu beach.

Despite the high celebrity quotient in the audience Wednesday, Versace spent the night backstage. His cobalt-blue polo shirt damp from exhilaration, he whizzed around the room, changing his mind about which wild silk print shirt to put on which male model. Meanwhile, half a dozen of them sat on a table, wearing nothing but jeans, waiting for his decision.

“He’s very hands-on about every part of the business,” noted Carolyn Mahboubi, who owns the Versace boutique in Beverly Hills. Earlier this week, John Martens of Neiman Marcus learned the same lesson. He got word that Versace had walked anonymously past the store, inspecting the windows filled with his custom-made dresses. It seems he didn’t go inside the store until Thursday, when he launched his fragrance, Versace V’e.

“From Gianni Versace, I learned never to be totally satisfied,” said Donatella Girombelli, owner of Genny, the Italian ready-to-wear company where Versace is the creative force behind the women’s collection. “He works through the exhaustion, so it’s not a negative thing, it’s part of the satisfaction. He’s like a professional athlete in that way.”

Genny is now the only label for which Versace designs outside his company. But in the past, he has created collections for Simplice, Callaghan and Mario Valentino, as well as costumes for Bejart Ballet and the LaScala theater in Milan.

“Fashion is my work, not my life,” he said earlier this week.

But his associates disagree. “He works all the time, he never stops,” Donatella Versace said.

“He reads, he swims, he is private and discrete,” his sister said. Versace is also single, reclusive at times, and she expects he will stay that way. “He only wants to be with the family, and to keep us all together.”

Nancy Ellison, the photographer who shot Bridges in Versace’s velvet robe, said she invited the designer to dinner at her Malibu home when they met. “I offered to invite some people,” said Ellis, who regularly photographs and sometimes chums with Sting, River Phoenix, Roseanna Arquette and the like.

“He said, ‘no, just us.’ I made pasta, if you can imagine the arrogance. Me, Gianni and my husband picnicked at the beach at sunset. He seemed perfectly content.”

Versace grew up in Southern Italy, where his mother was a seamstress, and he acquired a taste for traditional Mediterranean colors and a bareness of dress associated with resort life.

Some people describe his women’s collections--ready to wear and custom made--as daring and even dangerous. And he gives himself credit for setting the cutting-edge look of this spring, built around tight miniskirts and bright colors. “I like sexy clothes,” he said. “They express joy. They break barriers.”

His menswear for spring is a shock of salmon, lavender and lime-green suits worn with T-shirts of the same color. He doesn’t believe in neckties. “I don’t like stiff looking men,” he said.

(But, he added, “I make a lot of gray suits.” Conservative dressers wear them, as well as his closely fitted, though otherwise somewhat classic, tuxedos.)

This spring he launches his jeans line, which includes pastel denim pants that zip at the ankles and sculpted jackets with dome-like sleeves to wear over silk camp shirts.

And his Versace Atelier collections for spring are the most striking of all. In fact, they make fashion history.

He doesn’t call them couture, though he showed them in Paris with the couturiers. He showed custom-made jeans, hand-beaded unitards as light as hosiery, and mini-length evening dresses silk-screened with portraits of Marilyn Monroe as alternatives to what he calls the hat-and-veil couture image. “That’s the past,” he said.

Usually associated with multimillionaires who spend $5,000 and up for a suit and $10,000 and up for an evening dress, Versace said his Atelier customers are women who could afford classic couture but instead pay to wear his alternatives. In Paris, Christian Lacroix and Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel have the same idea, he added.

“Three years ago I decided to be like a child and play with fashion,” he said. Donatella encouraged it. And showing in Paris helped. They are for fun and fantasy, Milan is for basics and quality.”

He never did sit down for dinner Wednesday. And when it was time to bow after his show, he ventured only a few steps down the runway.

Shy perhaps. But not short of power.

Ellison plans to photograph him for a book of prominent people posing as they secretly see themselves. “I see Gianni Versace as a midlife Michelangelo,” she said.

Wonder what he’ll wear.