BY DESIGN : Satin Doll Boys : The Shiny-Shirt Trend Is Nothing to Gloss Over

There’s nothing subtle about a satin shirt. It’s right at home in a gangland hangout or in a sleazy cocktail lounge.

Cowboys croon in them. Mobsters look slick in them. And now young guns--who would rather look like a dangerous honey-bunny from “Pulp Fiction” than an Armani-wearing “American Gigolo”--are wearing them for dress-up.

At a recent L.A. party jammed with groovy guys, designer Mossimo Giannulli was the king of cool in a bright red satin shirt with a collar spread wider than the wingspan of a 747. He wore the shirt--stitched by Aristotle Circa and Dana Harvey Sr. of Angel Boy in Costa Mesa--with a high-gorge, four-buttoned Comme des Garcons suit.

“That’s the only way I would wear something like that--with the clean lines of a beautiful suit,” Giannulli says. “Otherwise you look too cartoony.”

Circa calls his high-gloss creation, for his Angel Boy’s Ca$h and Fla$h, “the six-figure shirt--because it looks like a hundred thousand dollars” even though it sells for $125.

“Satin is vibrant, it stands out, it catches the light,” he says. “It’s a cowboy-shirt influence and the cowboy is the quintessential American hero.”

Ron Herman, owner of Fred Segal Melrose, says his store’s “Fever” shirt--a satin number in bright colors and pastels that is often paired with matching satin pants--has been a bestseller for months. But the shiny shirt--at $145 for long sleeves and $120 for short sleeves--isn’t for everyman.

“It’s definitely for clubbing. It’s not a daytime thing. You’ve got to be in a party mode, mentally, to pull it off,” Herman says. “Young guys don’t want to dress like their dads or in Armani. They don’t want to be mainstream.”

Jonathan Meizler of the Los Angeles-based design duo JonValdi says he and his partner, German Valdivia, took their satin shirt cues from “this new sleazier movement” propelled by “Pulp Fiction” and “the resurgence of sex clubs,” Meizler says.

“I don’t get it,” he says. “I sort of like it and I’m sort of repulsed by it, but as fashion it’s fascinating because when you talk satin, you think of sexual sleaziness.”

Meizler and Valdivia do their $200 French-cuffed shirt in black, silver, cobalt blue and olive-gold.

Daniel Hazen, owner of Ozzie Dots, a vintage clothing shop in Los Feliz, says 1940s Western-styled satin shirts in his store range from $8 to $45, depending on the shirt’s condition.

At Worn Out West, another vintage store in Los Angeles, authentic 1940s satin shirts--in mint condition--range in price from $150 to $350.

Maggie Barry, who, along with partner Ty Moore, designs the Van Buren label, says her line’s satin shirt “is a tacky, tux look,” in a western cut with pearlized snaps and a big--”not huge”--collar. The crinkle satin shirts--done in baby blue, pink and Warhol-like pop brights, including blue, red, yellow and apple green--go for $80.

“It’s a ‘Saturday Night Fever’ look: tacky and glam rolled into one,” Barry says. “It’s kinda like bimbo’s menswear.”