Just Call Her ‘Barbara Bush Jr.’

New York hairdresser Frederic Fekkai’s handsome jaw must have dropped at the sight of his latest celebrity client, Hillary Rodham Clinton, selling her health-care plan Wednesday to a Washington audience of hospital and nursing-home workers.

Fekkai’s trademark soft cut had gone matronly--courtesy, we suspect, of hot rollers--matching the First Lady’s prim, polka-dotted, droopy-bow-tied blouse and matching box-pleated skirt. Who better to deliver a radical message than a woman disguised as a young Barbara Bush? Brilliant.

Denim Deal Makers: Hollywood execs are trading in their pleated gabardine slacks for jeans these days, leaving the uninitiated looking like overdressed nerds. One insider tells of meeting recently with a woman who showed up in “faded elephant bells from the ‘70s.”

Among Hollywood men, however, the jeans of choice are narrow and black, worn with loafers or boots, a blazer or leather jacket. The exception? “When we meet with bankers,” he says, “we always wear suits.”

If you’re reading this before a breakfast meeting at the Peninsula or lunch at the Dome, there’s still plenty of time to run and change.

It’s Showtime!: Speaking of lunch, another local tradition is the noontime fashion show. We always loved the idea of gobbling down a chopped salad while a model described the fabric content of her lingerie or broke into an unconvincing frug. You cannot parody something like that. It already is a parody.

On Tuesdays, hip and groovy restaurant/club Tatou in Beverly Hills is presenting a variation of the Ladies Luncheon Fashion Show, with clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue and models from a new agency called Trouble. No waifs among these beefy guys and busty gals--they’re the buffed-up, better-fed types you see in underwear ads and cheesecake calendars. But do they frug?

Has Pat Riley Seen This?Finally this week, a hairdo so distinctively bad that it took our minds off the presidential locks. What must handsome Kings Coach Barry Melrose be thinking with that Billy Ray Cyrus haircut? What goes through Billy Ray’s mind? Even heartthrob balladeer Michael Bolton clings to a version of the short-on-top-and-sides, abruptly-long-and-stringy-in-the-back style. It reminds us of Mel Gibson as Mad Max (“Beyond Thunderdome”). “He (Gibson) got paid a lot of money to get his hair cut like that!” noted one L.A. hairstylist. “What are these guys’ excuses?” Well?

Magazine Wars: The folks at Cosmopolitan and Elle demonstrated their keen appreciation of faulty logic this week with a couple of eye-catching newspaper ads. (Aimed at advertisers wondering, Who the hell reads these magazines, anyway? )

Example No. 1: A scantily clad Christy Turlington (or the text block next to her) asks: “When does a girl stop being a girl and become a woman?” About 22, she concludes, unless you happen to be That Cosmopolitan Girl, who is “fun-loving, playful, hopeful, excited about life. . . .” Now, with one raised eyebrow and two heaving breasts, Turlington isn’t exactly our idea of girlish, but then maybe we just aren’t fun-loving enough.

Example No. 2: “She is not a babe./She is not a wallflower./ She is not column A or B./Elle is not a magazine./She is a woman.” OK, so the thing we took with us into the bathtub the other night wasn’t a magazine, it was a woman. Tell that to Patricia Ireland and Sally Quinn, who “duke it out” on Page 46.

No Sex and the Single Girl: Speaking of Cosmo, the magazine’s longtime editrix, Helen Gurley Brown, turned up on (surprise!) local cable hostess Connie Martinson’s literary chatfest this week, laying on one anecdote after another for always appreciative Martinson.

It seems the event that was the catalyst for Brown’s seventh book, “The Late Show: A Semiwild but Practical Survival Plan for Women Over 50,” was a snub she endured at a New York cocktail party. While she chatted with singer Maureen McGovern, a Very Important Man inserted himself into the conversation, lavishing attention on the “younger, prettier” woman and leaving Brown mortified.

“I can talk about Bosnia or the deficit as well as anyone,” protested the charming Brown. But at 71, does she still have a girlish, hopeful outlook about them?