ABSOLUTELY FATUOUS

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

The upcoming NBC-television movie On Seventh Avenue tells the fictional story of Nadine, an ambitious Manhattan designer forced to give up a job at one of the city's swankiest clothiers in an effort to rescue her father's ailing apparel house. Soon we find Nadine immersed in a cashmere-free universe of greasy loan sharks, one of whom tries to win the heart of a supermodel with lines like, "My mother's side of the family is great tailors. I coulda been a designa!"

On Seventh Avenue is ridiculous, of course, yet it paints a far more engaging portrait of fashion culture than the ever mounting number of cable-TV shows devoted to reporting on high style. Given pop culture's unabating fascination with designers, models and the celebrities who worship them, it's not surprising that TV has finally taken a focused interest in fashion, which, after all, is no monotonous affair; it should be a winning marriage. But most of these half-hour programs replay the same runway footage from Milan, Paris and New York City time and time again and have succeeded only in making the glamour business soporific.

In addition to CNN's 15-year-old Style with Elsa Klensch and MTV's successful House of Style, we have VH-1's Fashion Television, as well as two programs from the E! channel--Fashion File and Videofashion. And coming next month to cable viewers in New York and Los Angeles: the Fashion Network, a 24-hour outlet for style coverage. Watch these shows frequently enough, and you will see the same Anna Sui print skirt half-a-dozen times, as well as airy, rerun interviews with the same designers and fashion editors. Indeed, these shows do not seem intended for people who love clothes so much as they seem aimed at those with a high tolerance for watching Karl Lagerfeld mutter from behind his fluttering fan that what he likes about fashion is "change."

Do not expect anyone on these shows to receive even the gentlest criticism. Unlike Unzipped, last year's acclaimed documentary on designer Isaac Mizrahi, the cable programs approach fashion without a hint of irony. Allure editor Polly Allen Mellen was depicted as an absurdity in that film; on a recent episode of Fashion Television she is deified, despite the fact that she is shown on a cell phone calling someone "a pest, a pest, an adorable pest."

MTV's House of Style generally does a better job of keeping its stilettos rooted in planet earth. Relaunched in March with supermodels Amber Valletta and Shalom Harlow as co-hosts, replacing Cindy Crawford, House peddles a real-world, street-influenced sensibility. It is the only place to see little-known designers like New Yorker Pixie Yates, who in a recent segment showed girls how to make their own genuinely attractive prom bags for less than $10. House of Style is the favorite fashion program of the professionally chic, notes Vogue editor Katherine Betts, "because it has a point of view." Indeed.

"You don't learn style from watching people on a runway," proclaims Shalom. "Fashion happens every morning when you wake up." Well, yes, perhaps if you have a shoe closet the size of hers. But the point is that style requires imagination, and so too does good TV.

--By Ginia Bellafante