Entrepreneur Takes Aim at Fashion Trend : Business: New Hampshire man sells bullet-riddled clothing as a lark. But he’s under fire by those who object to his high-caliber style.

It was an especially hot summer day, and Frank Allgeyer had worked up quite a sweat out there at the sandpit, shooting holes in T-shirts with his MAC-10 automatic submachine gun.

Oh, and there also were bullet-riddled jeans and jackets, all victims this scorching Friday of Allgeyer’s unerring trigger finger and shrewd fashion marksmanship.

“Who’d have thought?” said the 44-year-old carpenter, now the corporate sharpshooter behind the sights of Drive-By Fashions, a one-month-old enterprise that will “custom-perforate” your favorite jeans, T-shirts or denim jackets. “I mean, this whole thing started out as a goof.”

But some Granite State politicians were less than amused. New Hampshire Atty. Gen. Jeffrey R. Howard called a news conference Wednesday to denounce what he feared was a potentially dangerous teen-age fashion trend. He was joined by a Democratic state senator, Barbara Baldizar, who worried that children might “take guns and try to shoot their own holes in clothing.”

Little did the two state officials realize that Allgeyer and his best friend, Steve Holden, also a carpenter, had dreamed up Drive-By Fashions on a fishing day when nothing was biting. Talking about how ridiculous it was that people actually paid good money for pants with holes and slashes in them, the pair began speculating about the limits of couture correctness.

“It was like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit,” said Holden, 42. “We were out there in a boat, and we’re thinking, ‘Yeah, maybe we should throw some grenades at a pile of T-shirts.”’

Holden went so far as to dare his friend to run with what both admitted was a ludicrous idea. In a black-bordered two-by-four-inch advertisement in the Manchester Union Leader, Allgeyer proved he was a better fiction writer than fisherman. “Looking for that unique gift for the person who has everything?” he wrote. “Clothes with bullet holes are big on the West Coast now.”

A mailing address and price list followed.

So did a firestorm that Allgeyer said he was completely unprepared for. Along with his political strafing, Allgeyer was shrapneled in a Boston Globe editorial Friday berating him for a “tacky, tasteless fashion scam” that promotes violence in a country where every day 42 people are killed by firearms.

San Francisco psychologist Ross E. Goldstein, president of a trend-watching organization called Generation Insights Inc., termed those reactions “another example of people trying to set social policy by quick and easy sloganing.”

“It’s like magic,” he went on, “this idea that we will ban the most visible symptom and thus stop the cause. The problem is not fashions with bullet holes, the problem is much deeper.”

Alan Millstein, a fashion analyst in New York, said bullet-riddled clothing no more condoned violence than military surplus attire could be viewed as “a statement of support for the armed forces.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that in Beverly Hills or the East Village, they would find a host of fashion flakes and fashion savants who would want to wear these kinds of things,” Millstein said.

Allgeyer, a native of a state where green flies pose a greater menace than gang warfare, said he could not understand why anyone in Southern California would want to buy his product anyway.

“In L.A., from what I understand, all you have to do is hang a bag of laundry on your porch in the morning, and by afternoon, you’ll have drive-by fashions,” Allgeyer said.

“ ‘Course,” he added, tongue planted firmly in cheek, “then you wouldn’t have the certificate of authenticity.”

Pointing out that if current projections hold true, New Hampshire will have an annual homicide rate of 12 for all of 1994, Allgeyer stressed that “this was never meant to be mean-spirited or to promote gang violence or anything like that. I can’t emphasize that enough.”

He said he found it ironic that in a state known for its panther-like protection of individual liberties, his T-shirt company would suddenly become a cause celebre. New Hampshire takes seriously the phrase “Live Free or Die” emblazoned on its license plates, Allgeyer noted.

“Here we have the attorney general, the defender of peoples’ rights, and he’s walking all over my First Amendment rights,” Allgeyer said. “We don’t even have a line of clothing in stores, and he’s trying to get us banned from schools in September.”

The venture has hardly been a financial gold mine, either. In one month, Allgeyer has “custom-perforated” about 35 garments that have been sent to him. Prices range from $15 to $35, and customers can select how many rounds of ammunition they want, as well as the type of firearm. Most, he said, opt for “the flagship of the fleet,” the machine gun.

All of his weapons are fully licensed, Allgeyer said, explaining that after he has paid for the ammunition and the gas he uses to drive out to the local sandpit, where the shooting is conducted, “I’m probably making about $6 an hour. I make more than that pounding nails.”

But if Drive-By Fashions does turn a profit, Allgeyer has pledged to donate some of his earnings to anti-violence groups or drug rehabilitation programs.

But he expressed amazement that even three dozen people would spend money on the shoot-’em-up look.

“Look, I started out goofing on everybody,” Allgeyer said. “I’m still goofing on everybody. And now the politicians are goofing on themselves.”