It's vegas, baby! Luck is definitely a lady as far Agent Provocateur is concerned.(Serena Rees)(Interview)

Byline: Lynn Yaeger

There has always been this wonderful image of Vegas in my mind, something out of the forties or fifties and really, really glamorous," confesses Serena Rees, who, with her husband, Joseph Corre, owns the famously saucy lingerie line Agent Provocateur. "Vegas to me was women in floor-length gowns and wonderful makeup, dripping in diamonds, and all the men in suits, smoking cigars at the roulette tables. So when I actually arrived my first time from London, I was kind of . . . shocked."

She is sitting at an outdoor table at a place called Mon Ami Gabi, which, despite its verdigris columns and a menu scrawled on the windowpane, is not anywhere near France. In fact, it's dead in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard, across from Caesars Palace, where Agent Provocateur has just opened in The Forum Shops, a 100-store-plus mall where you can spend those gambling profits (or buy something as a balm for losses).

As she lunches on moules sans frites, a steady current of tourists uniformly garbed in shorts and T-shirts streams by. They look nothing like Rees's imaginary Vegas Vargas woman, but her faith is steadfast. "People come here for dirty weekends, for honeymoons, for fun!" she says. "We always knew this was the right place for us."

Somewhere in the desert sprawl lurk vestiges of the dangerous excitement that suffused the place when Vegas was Vegas-and Rees is going to find that lost city. Cruising through the Paris casino, she is frankly appalled by the garcon uniforms on the female croupiers: "Why aren't they dressed like French maids?" She heads through the Palms, where the waitresses wear

car-wash pleated-patent

micro-skirts ("Oh, my God, they look so cheap!") and onward to Caesars Palace, where she is heartened to see mini-togaed staffers of all shapes and what appears to be a 50-year age span serving up drinks.