FASHION : Designer Creativity Also Extends to the Lexicon of Colors : New names for old shades are coined each year. Last season’s sea-foam blue is now called mist. But what color IS tobacco?

Fashion, as we know, is fickle. Styles change. Trends come into flower, and are gone in a few short weeks like gladiolus withering on a grave.

What’s in goes out, and when it’s back again, it has a brand-new name.

Take color. A building block of the style world. There was a time when fashion hues had names as plain as crayons: Violet. Rust. Blue-green. Burnt orange. That time of straight talk is gone forever, drowned by the swelling tide of euphemism that has swamped the marketing world.

The trend infiltrated clothing circles subtly.

For years, blue-green was aqua or turquoise. It matured into azure. It branched into sea-foam.

Then, it metastasized. Try to find sea-foam on the tickets of this fall’s wardrobes. We tried. We found mist--a dead ringer for plain old aqua. We found Caribbean. We found peacock and robin’s egg and ultramarine. In Tweed’s fall catalogue we found a dull turquoise called Cambridge.

The logic escaped us. So did quilt for a perfectly average royal blue. So, likewise did potpourri for a tomato color and moon dance for a pumpkin shade.

We are not making these up. If we were, we would think of funnier titles. Bubble gum. Zucchini. Bat. These probably won’t be on fashion palettes soon. But they would tell a straighter story.

Actually, zucchini might make it into fashion history. The vegetable kingdom seems the favorite reference matter for fashion names, just as the automobile industry once sanctioned mammals.

This fall’s upscale women’s wear colors include leaf, celery, banana, bark, fig, ginger, tamarind and milkweed.

A sales manager in women’s wear at Bullock’s in Thousand Oaks said customers do pick up on exotic color names mentioned in their ads. “If a coat is listed as aubergine, they will ask for it that way,” she said. “People who shop pretty much develop a knowledge of the colors that come along. It is a fashion-forward kind of thing.”

Maybe women are seduced by such sweet talk. We checked with Eric Zacher, co-manager of Rains in Ojai and a veteran of 22 years in retail. Does the vocabulary epidemic rage in the virile ranks of local men’s fashion?

He had never thought of it. But it was all around him.

He looked through stacks and racks, and learned that the lexicon of primary colors was gone.

“Hmmm,” he said, finding that there was no blue in the entire department; instead there were indigo and denim.

“We have never utilized their words,” he said, clearly surprised that they were out there. “Our customers never ask in those terms,” he added, rummaging through sweaters labeled cypress and chestnut.

“If you come in wanting a tan shirt in long sleeve, I am not going to overwhelm you with details you don’t need to know,” he said, moving to a maroon sweater labeled cabernet.

“Well, I would call that Burgundy,” he said, frowning at the sweater.

He reached for a Jantzen shirt, and guessed that it would be labeled forest green.

“The older, established vendors are going to call a spade a spade,” he said. Alas, the familiar green had evolved to mallard.

At last, he found a pair of Haggar wash slacks tagged khaki. He seemed pleased with the discovery. We left him with it, and went to check the women’s aisles.

It was the same story. Navy was transformed to midnight. Sea-foam here was aloe. A mauve silk tunic had the title stone rose.

The strangest choice was on a dusky orange-yellow sweater by Renee Hauer. It said, tobacco.

Tobacco? You may as well try to sell a car named Weasel. Why would a wholesaler pick such a name?

We called to ask.

Sarah Gilroy, a knitwear designer in New York, said she was responsible for the politically incorrect tobacco.

“Some colors are real hard to name. That was a hard one,” said Gilroy, a nonsmoker. “Before we called it London tan. This doesn’t really make sense, but sometimes it doesn’t have to.”

So, what was wrong with London tan? Easy, it was last year’s name.

“If we carry a color forward, we change its name,” said Gilroy, who indicated that it was a corporate decision. “I think people want the newness; they don’t want to see cherry red again; they want to know that this year there’s fire red. Customers are very interested in the names of the colors.”

Gilroy is busy now naming colors for fall 1994. We didn’t tell her that we read prices, not color names, or that her creativity is wasted on the likes of Eric Zacher. We didn’t want to spoil her day.