By Samantha Critchell
The Associated Press

Lucy Ricardo was a fashion icon for a generation and so was Alexis Carrington Colby. Ditto for Charlie's Angels, and Rachel, Monica and Phoebe.

TV characters not only wear the hottest trends; often they set them.

Remember Lucy's halter-top dresses with full skirts on I Love Lucy? And Alexis' shoulder-pad-filled blouses kept both her business and personal rivals on Dynasty at bay. Both looks caught on with women in a way that couture clothes worn by supermodels never will.

But Lucy's cinched waists, the Angels' sexy athletic wear and even Rachel's much-imitated bouncy hairdo from Friends early days have seen their heydays come and go, so 47 students at the California Design College have given these trendy-turned-tired styles a facelift.

The Trendsetters in Television fashion show, recently staged in Beverly Hills, Calif., sent above-the-knee dresses in polka-dot prints down the runway for a modern Lucy, and a three-piece suit minus the usual fourth piece - a shirt - surely would work on Charlie's Angels. Meanwhile, the linen suits from Miami Vice still have a place in pop culture - as long as the colors are turned down from colorful sorbet shades to neutrals.

Anghela Zograyan, 27, says she hopes the design-technology techniques she learned in the fashion program will help her launch a career in costume design. Her part of the project was to create even more up-to-the-minute fashions for Sex and the City, already considered to be the most style conscious show on television.

Updating with fabrics

"I took a lot of '40s and '50s looks and made them sexier by using different fabrics, like silk taffeta and crinkled silk chiffon," explains Zograyan.

She says she tried to mix what she expects to be the immediate future of fashion - cocktail dresses with low backs and slits with chiffon inserts - with each of the characters' personalities.

But while the Sex and the City girls influence what mainstream America wears, the show also reflects what mainstream America likes. "Now you're seeing people in floral, fuller skirts and rose details like Sarah Jessica Parker wore," Zograyan says.

"TV is sort of a moving fashion catalog," says Donna Mills, star of the 1980s series Knots Landing, which students identified as one of the trend-making shows of that decade.

Mills says she received a lot of mail asking for hair and makeup tips, prompting her to create her own cosmetics kit, sold on QVC.

Intimidation factor

"The general public is a little intimidated by fashion. A lot of people don't know how to put things together or how to wear something. It's the same with makeup," Mills observes. "But when they see people - even if it's on TV - wearing the clothes and moving around in them, it is really helpful."

Also, notes Sabrina Kay, California Design College president and founder, not all the characters on television shows are young, tall and thin, which makes them a little bit more like real people. At the fashion show, students updated the plus-size wardrobes featured on Designing Women and The Jeffersons.

"Their (the students') desire to do plus sizes shows some business sense because it's an underserved market," Kay says. "Our students are programmed to be practical. It's the way we train our students to make a career."

Fashionable shows

Students at California Design College chose what they thought were the most influential TV shows over the past 50 years, updated the wardrobes and put on a runway show they called Trendsetters in Television.

Shows recognized included:

I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners and Leave It To Beaver from the 1950s.

Star Trek, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, The Addams Family, Gilligan's Island, The Brady Bunch and I Dream of Jeannie from the '60s.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Happy Days, The Jeffersons, The Bionic Woman and Charlie's Angels from the '70s.

Dynasty, Designing Women, The Cosby Show, Miami Vice, Dallas and Knots Landing from the '80s.

Beverly Hills, 90210, Will & Grace, Friends, Absolutely Fabulous, The Sopranos and Sex and the City from the '90s.

The West Wing, The Osbournes, Scrubs, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Gilmore Girls and Alias, in the 2000s.