Where’s Tiffanie?

They used to be known as the shop-till-you drop young darlings, with cash in their purses and air in their heads. Although they seemingly have become an endangered species, their admirers still show signs of devotion.

At Burbank and Valley Circle boulevards in Woodland Hills, a street sign that used to say Valley Cir now proclaims Valley Girl .

No one has claimed responsibility for this non-sanctioned alteration, perhaps because the perpetrators are too busy searching for the real thing.

A quick check of shopping malls, once the natural habitat of the Junior Buy Birds, suggests that they have flown the coop.

You can find parking places at malls in Glendale, Sherman Oaks, Northridge and Canoga Park, and locate sales clerks at Nordstrom who don’t look busy.

You can shoot a cannon through some stores and only disable the merchandise.

Where have all those Moon Zappa’d, card-carrying Valley Girls gone?

These days, it’s hard to find anyone who will cop to the title, much less hang out at the mall.

Alex, who said his last name is Just Alex, is a totally cool dude of 15 who attends Harvard School and ventures into Sherman Oaks Galleria only to buy Top Siders.

He said he doesn’t know anyone--and certainly not anyone he would take out--who would even admit to being a Valley Girl because it’s so uncool.

“That’s more for girls in Encino,” he said.

Alex lives in Sherman Oaks.

Gloria Vasquez, 19, works at Kinney Shoes in the Galleria and was born and raised in Van Nuys, but said she’s no Valley Girl.

“A Valley Girl is a white chick with more money than brains,” she said, adding that she doesn’t go around with people like that.

Debbie Derringer, 18, is blonde and blue-eyed and wants to be a Laker Girl. She loves to shop at Glendale Galleria and looks as though she might admit to Valley Girl syndrome.

No way.

“Valley Girls live in the Valley and I live in Glendale,” she said. “And Valley Girls are sort of silly and say ‘fer sure’ a lot.”

Debbie said she’s not like that.

Fer sure.

Gabriella Zenlyak, 11, said she isn’t like that either, but she’s happy to be called a Valley Girl.

“I come to the Galleria all the time to shop,” she said, but she admitted that it’s getting kind of lonely there.

“Not as many kids come and hang out as they used to,” she said, looking around at the wide-open spaces of the food mall. “I don’t know where everyone’s gone, but they don’t seem to spend a lot of time here.”

Wendy Tafoya, 21, who works at Victoria’s Secret in Sherman Oaks Galleria, was born in San Francisco and lived back East for most of her life, coming to the Valley in February. She said she hasn’t seen many Valley Girl types either, then reconsidered.

“These days, a Valley Girl is apt to be a Persian or Armenian woman with gold or platinum credit cards,” she said.

“We love them.”

Mad for Them

You do not need a note from your psychiatrist, and the purchase need not depend on proof of lunacy.

Anyone can buy the new brand of double T-shirts at Bullock’s Northridge, according to sales associate Sara Sichanh. She admitted, however, that people seeing the new line that the Northridge store is test-marketing sometimes seem a little confused.

The double T’s, which usually feature a bright color underneath and a more subdued one on top, have “Psycho” printed across the front in big, black letters.

“Sometimes,” she said, “people look at them like they aren’t sure whether it’s some kind of joke, a tongue-in-cheek thing or intended for crazy people.”

Whether you are doesn’t matter at all, she said. All you need is about $25 and the shirt is yours.

If the confusion keeps up, though, the Northridge store might take a lesson from Liberty House in Honolulu.

For years, Liberty House had a sign near the Local’s Only brand T-shirt rack saying that tourists could buy them too.

Piercing Subject

Cheaters--for boys and men who want to look as though they have pierced ears but don’t actually want to pierce them--are a big thing now, according to Farnaz Baranriz of Claire’s, an earring shop at Topanga Plaza.

She said many males are buying the new magnetic earrings, which cost about $5.

“They buy a stud, or maybe a cross or a hoop, and the magnetic inner piece looks just like a pierced-ear post,” she said.

The earrings usually are bought by kids whose moms won’t let them have their ears pierced, but a lot of Yuppies--who might focus on business during the day but still want to look cool at night--are wearing them too, she said.

Baranriz said she was surprised when a formally dressed older man came in recently and headed for the magnetic earring rack.

“His granddaughter told him that he would look good in them, so he came in and bought a pair.”

Hair, Hair

Rage hair salon in Northridge Fashion Square is a cutting-edge kind of place. But Eric Ducette, who has been doing a lot of the snipping the past four years, said hair styles today are mostly television reruns.

Kids who come in ask to look like everyone from Ice-T to Bart Simpson or anyone on MTV, but no new looks are coming out of lifestyles the way that, say, the surfer shag swept Southern California long ago.

Ducette said the girls want their hair short, like that of Julia Roberts, Demi Moore or Madonna, and the guys want it every which way, including short, long, shaved, Mohawked and stepped, which means it looks as though it was layered with bowls of various sizes.

“If you don’t watch TV, you don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said.

Overheard

“My credit rating has fallen and it refuses to get up.”

--Man in line at an

automatic teller machine

in Sherman Oaks