They Just Don’t Get It : Out-of-towners <i> think</i> they know how to dress here. A Hawaiian shirt? Feel free to leave home without it.

Linda Wells, Allure magazine’s editor in chief, has a perfectly fine wardrobe--for everywhere, that is, but the world’s most enigmatic fashion zone. “I’m completely stumped every time I go to L.A. ‘Now, what do I do? I don’t own any beige,’ ” she says. “I sometimes feel I’ve popped in from a different planet.”

If Wells, a high-profile insider, feels alien anxiety, just imagine the average insider landing in what Michael Collins, senior vice president of the Convention and Visitors Bureau, chauvinistically calls “the capital of American invention.”

“Whatever anyone thinks about Los Angeles fashion is true,” Collins says, “because it gives real meaning to the word eclectic. One can make any comment on fashion in L.A. and probably find evidence to support it. I defy you to say that about Cleveland.”

And that’s the problem. Influenced by a rebellious frontier spirit, ethnic diversity, a sunny climate, a pervasive entertainment industry and the car culture, the L.A. look is all over the board: from button-down in Downtown and proper in Pasadena, to hip in Hollywood, haute in Beverly Hills, embellished in Encino and buff-beyond-belief in Malibu.

Of course, Wells has a real need to know where she stands. She comes here on business--the beauty and fashion business. So far, she has eased some of her angst with a pantsuit by Giorgio Armani and another by Jil Sander.

She has a bit of navy now and even “one beige thing,” she admits. “But I can’t wear it every day. My uniform is a New York one. It’s 99% black with heavy black tights, black suede high heels, black bag--and white skin. So, the times I’ve taken my New York wardrobe to L.A., I’ve felt really odd. You don’t wear as much black, tights and high heels on a daily basis. I’m not talking Oscars--just going out to lunch.”

New Yorkers have a problem with black in L.A., which might surprise locals who often feel they are swimming in a sea of fashion ink. But it’s just one of many perceptions and misconceptions. And it ranks right up there with the notion that this is a bad-taste land of glitz, sunglasses, stilettos, bleached blondes and incredible bodies in skimpy, inappropriate clothing.

While color sells better here than in other parts of the country, says Saks Fifth Avenue President Rose Marie Bravo, black is never far behind. Another mistake is packing too many sleeveless linen dresses, a style and fabric better left to New York and Chicago, Bravo says, “where they go through three months of a hot and humid summer.”

Glitz “is definitely a misconception,” she insists. “I guess it comes after seeing years of the Academy Awards. But so many people understand low-key elegance. We also find Los Angeles is one of the most fashion-forward markets. Anything new out of Europe sells best in L.A.”

Sami Dinar, owner of the eponymous Beverly Hills menswear store, agrees. The L.A. look “is more daring, more creative,” he says. “There is some casualness, some easiness. It’s a look that’s making L.A. more and more of a shopping mecca. People from Florida, New York, Chicago come here just for a day to shop and to go to a restaurant.”

The unisex uniform of jeans, white shirt and blazer is a Los Angeles creation “that is copied all over the world,” Dinar says.

But incorrectly by unsophisticated outsiders, observes Herbert Fink, owner of Theodore in Beverly Hills, who explains that the L.A. look “is more of an attitude than the clothing. Their attitude should be easy, not uptight. They try to do the same thing we do, but they don’t really understand it. Rather than wear a casual pant, chances are they’re wearing a suit pant with a navy jacket with perhaps a print shirt underneath.

“People think they’re coming to Hawaii when they’re coming to L.A. They don’t understand what we’re doing here. They wear their jeans incorrectly. They press them, put a crease in front.”

And they probably didn’t pay $200 for them, the going rate at Fred Segal on Melrose Avenue, where owner Ron Herman describes the L.A. look as “a perception of a certain Hollywood glamour combined with athletic fitness and health consciousness. It means special. It means unique; it means outgoing; it means not being a wallflower or hidden. It means looking the best you can and not blending in.”

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It can also mean pressure, as Nancy Miller Lewis discovered six years ago when she moved to L.A. from Cincinnati to cover fashion for the Copley newspapers. She lived in Laguna Beach, worked out of a Torrance office and covered the fashion scene all over the place.

“I had my closet divided: ‘These are my clothes to wear to the beach community. These are the clothes, I think, I can wear to work.’ I had certain suits I would wear only to Beverly Hills. I had other things to wear to Hollywood--none of which were the same,” explains Lewis, who has escaped to Troy, Mich., where she works for IndyCar, the auto racing organization, and wears a uniform designed by Alexander Julian. “You feel this artificial pressure to look right wherever you are. It’s mind-boggling. You are like a little Barbie doll.”

Lewis’ pal, Jeffrey Kowalczyk, who works with her as director of promotions at IndyCar, has a different take on the scene. When he moved to L.A. from Rochester, Mich., in the mid-’80s, he had, he says, “this vision of surfer dude meets ‘The Mod Squad.’ It was nothing like that. First off, anything goes in L.A. I thought it was going to be a real pretentious attitude, but it wasn’t. L.A. creates this aura within you and you become comfortable with your own personality. And I think eventually what happens is you become comfortable wearing whatever you feel comfortable in. I think it’s the magic of L.A.”

Magic is hardly the word Christine Dunford would use. The actress, who will be on “Hudson Street,” a new ABC series this fall, moved to L.A. four years ago and expected, she says, that “it would be a lot like New York because it’s a metropolitan center with a lot of high-gloss industries. I was really surprised my first week: It was like going to a night club in the middle of the day.”

Dunford is convinced that people in L.A. “are so wedded to their image, they lose sight of what is appropriate. Here it boils down not to a beautiful line of fabric but how to drape the body to show off what was done in the gym. It’s a youth culture. I love New York with all the 70-year-old women walking down the street, beautifully groomed in beautiful clothes. There are more levels to be judged on in New York, Paris and London.”

The youth culture shows up all too often on studio lots, where, she says, “the odd costuming really took me by surprise. You see a guy in tight black pants, puffy white shirt, a bandanna tied around his hair and an earring. Here’s a guy with a fair amount of responsibility in essence saying: ‘I’m not an executive, I’m a pirate.’ They want power, but they think it’s hip to eschew the trappings of power and pretend they’re still a little kid.”

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Studio women are different, says author Olivia Goldsmith. In fact, her most recent novel, “Fashionably Late” (HarperCollins, 1994) led to a handbook, due out in September, titled “Simple Isn’t Easy.”

“There’s a simplicity in the stylish dress that continues to elude me,” says Goldsmith, a former New Yorker living in Hollywood, Fla. “Somebody out there puts on a simple white one-piece dress and sandals, or a pair of linen pants and a little tight-fitting T-shirt, and that’s it. It looks great. In New York, you would feel underdressed: ‘Where’s my stuff? My scarf? My jacket?’

“I’m talking from Sherry Lansing down,” Goldsmith says. “She’s always in Armani, but she always looks simple, casual and very sophisticated. I was wearing blazers with silk blouses and slacks with belts. It’s a lot and it’s all coordinated. And I’d even venture to say it looks good in New York. But it’s too much stuff for L.A.

“I’m not talking about the heavy furniture crowd. The Beverly Hills lady who lunches in a three-piece Chanel suit. Or the Hancock Park crowd. They look the same all over the world. I’m talking about people who are hip. It’s not an age thing. It’s people with a certain sense of relaxed style.”

At night in L.A., Goldsmith says, “It’s a little bit more bare and simpler than in New York, where there would be more diamonds showing.”

Indeed, visitors here often have a hard time finding the expected glamour. Says Viktoria Kaye, an image consultant and former head of studio services at I. Magnin: “People usually think of the L.A. look as a blonde with a golden-bronze body in an incredible bikini. But ‘Baywatch’ is not necessarily what people live by. We’re more conservative than the rest of the country imagines.”

So conservative, in fact, that friends of Kaye’s from Panama recently expressed disappointment after touring Rodeo Drive. “There weren’t that many beautiful bombshells,” Kaye says. And the businessmen she took to a chic Melrose Avenue restaurant barely recognized Richard Gere, dressed as he was in a T-shirt, black jeans, cowboy boots and hair that, Kaye says, “was clean but it didn’t look full. They expected him to look high-buffed.”

Editor Wells knows why Gere looked so low-buffed. Starting with a friend’s story of the prominent L.A. woman who greeted her in a facial mask (“It was Sunday, and Sunday was her facial day”), she opines that people here “tend to focus more on life as a process. I’m inclined to see women in exercise clothes about to exercise, or they might have some sort of treatment in their hair or on their face. It’s a work in progress.”