INSIDE OUT / NOTES FROM THE STYLE FRONT : Looking Oh-So Dapper in Diapers

When Grammy Awards show host Garry Shandling introduced the Red Hot Chili Peppers Wednesday night as a group that shows “there are no fashion rules,” he said a mouthful. Men in diapers. Men in wedding gowns. Men in geisha wigs.

Even Shandling, bless his heart, broke with fashion convention, wearing a tuxedo with shoulder pads the size of two balkanized nations. (To signal his solidarity with Linda Evans?) Worth noting was the modesty, even restraint with which most women on the show dressed. k.d. lang evoked a sort of Keanu-Reeves-meets-Johnny-Cash look, with droopy locks of hair and an elongated Richard Tyler suit jacket, vest and pants. Janet Jackson wore Tyler, too, but hers was ultra-drapey and white.

That left the flesh-baring to the men, and well, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Billy Idol presented an award as well as a glimpse of his medallion-festooned chest, while Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Kiedis gave more, much more. Billy Ray Cyrus may have gyrated below, but his beefy torso was covered by a tank shirt that read: John, 3:16.

Just when you think you’ve got a trend all sewn up, someone like Celine Dion comes along. Dion, who sang the ballad “Beauty and the Beast” with Peabo Bryson, wore a very fashionable, very diaphanous loosely knitted gown that left little doubt which half of the song’s title she was vying for.

Vat, You Think I Look Like a Rapper?”I have never seen so much abuse of Azzedine Alaia in my life!” complained hip-hop maestro and soon-to-be haberdasher Russell Simmons in a controlled diatribe against: the Grammy Awards, L.A. and the city’s stylistically challenged inhabitants.

What did Simmons, ensconced at the Four Seasons hotel on business this week, expect to see at Le Dome, a restaurant known for its clientele of unrepentant Alaia abusers and the men who love them? Something a little more classy. A woman shouldn’t be falling out the top of a beautiful $4,500 leather dress. You wouldn’t see that in New York.

Fashion dictums roll off Simmons’ tongue since he hired a pair of photogenic 20-year-old skateboarding designers to create a line of sportswear called Phat Farm that mixes “touches of Timberland, Tommy Hilfinger and Ralph Lauren.” Simmons has said his khakis, Anoraks, sweaters and jackets look just as good on young hipsters as on “60-year-old Jewish men.”

Asked to elaborate, he says, “Both of them don’t really care what they’re wearing. It’s their attitude while they’re wearing it.”

Twin Peeks: We’ve been seeing double this week. The March issues of Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar feature pairs of cover models who look as if they could be sisters. Posing as they were, four abreast at our local newsstand, the twinned (quadrupled?) images cried out for some twisted, completely irrelevant imposed meaning. Then it hit us. Of course. It takes two of the new “gamin” models to anchor a cover where once one was enough.

Closing Up Shop: Lina Lee, who opened her Beverly Hills boutique in 1977 and survived a bankruptcy in 1989, will close her Rodeo Drive store April 8. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Lina Lee catered to a clientele that craved abbreviated European sportswear at almost any price, but today, Lee admits, women aren’t splurging the way they once did. Lina Lee in Encino will be the model for future stores, featuring clothes “priced for the ‘90s.” My, how fast bad news travels down the fabled Drive: one retailer confides he has already scheduled a meeting with one of Lina Lee’s best saleswomen.

Legwork: First we saw them on Juliette Binoche in “Damage,” then Madonna wore garterless stockings in “Body of Evidence.” When Andie MacDowell pulled back her gown for photographers at the recent Council for Fashion Design awards in New York to show off her gams, there they were again.

“Oh, those were probably ours,” says Elizabeth Brouner of Fogal of Switzerland, the Beverly Hills hosiery store. “I know she shops here.”

Garterless stockings, thigh-high’s or teddy tights have been around for years--at times, around the wearer’s ankles. “I remember walking down the street in New York and dipping into every alley to pull them up,” recalls Brouner. Those weren’t Fogals, which at $46 to $60, are guaranteed to stay up. But then, so do the $4 thigh-high’s saleswoman Carmen Reese sells at Parklane Hosiery in the Fox Hills Mall. “Like, right now, I’m wearing a skin-tight dress, and I don’t want a pantyhose line, so I wear these.”

Calvin Klein likes thigh-high’s to be worn so the wide lacy band that holds them up is exposed. We’d like to see them on Marky Mark.

Shopping Sagas: Young exec wearing an artistically correct Matisse-print tie paces outside a Westside boutique, talking business on his cellular phone: “I’ll be there in about 10 minutes . . . I gotta get my mom a present first. It’s her birthday.” Matisse Man strides to the counter, asks to see a $24 bracelet, hesitates, hands it back to the clerk.

“Too expensive,” he says, and strides out.

Yeah, Mom will be just as happy to get .. a phone call.

Twin Peaks: Are artificially inflated bust lines going the way of monolithic shoulder pads? Perhaps, at least in the minds of “sensitive” guys. On Thursday’s episode of “Seinfeld,” Jerry lusts after a woman who, Elaine insists, has breast implants. “I can put up with a false personality,” he says, “but I have to draw the line somewhere.”