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Though the story of Romeo and Juliet never goes out of fashion, the question posed by the Opera Company of Philadelphia is this: Can it be about fashion? And on a less-than-Armani budget?

Skepticism abounds in advance of Friday's opening of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette, which turns the Montagues and Capulets from families into rival fashion houses, spraying paint over each other's posters while vying for market domination. Surely the opera company's executives, Robert B. Driver and David Devan, are fielding plenty of "star-crossed runways" wisecracks.

The two explode into laughter. "That's the first!" says Driver.

"Whatever generates dialogue!" says Devan.

A revelation? A flop? Opera Company insiders speculate that the chances of either are equal.

Whatever happens, the Manfred Schweigkofler-directed production at the Academy of Music is bound to look fantabuloso. Or at least it ought to: Heading the cast are a handsome real-life couple, soprano Ailyn Perez and tenor Stephen Costello, now seen around town on posters that look like genuine fashion ads. Covers of a Vogue-ish magazine featuring Perez - "Juliette Capulet: What to Wear" - are the fruits of a photo session last summer that capitalized on Perez and Costello's untraditional operatic silhouettes.

"Sometimes my job is to make a 50-year-old woman look like a 16-year-old virgin," says costume designer Richard St. Clair, "and then I have some 22-year-old hot chick from Curtis playing her mother. This time, the people . . . look like the characters they're playing. . . . At the shoot, Ailyn worked the dress, she worked the hair, she played to the camera. The photographer was wowed."

Perez is just relieved to be out of traditional Renaissance-era costumes that require a corset. "It gives us the freedom to be flexible," she says. "We can be onstage and use our bodies in telling the story."

And the impact on the music? "I don't think it affects the way you sing it at all," says Costello.

The idea started when the German-born Schweigkofler, who is artistic director of the Bolzano City Theater, realized that the entire dilemma of Romeo and Juliet was long outmoded - marriages aren't prevented by feuding families anymore. As if to head off raised eyebrows from Driver and Devan, Schweigkofler submitted a detailed scenario about how the transposition of eras and cultures could work. His primary argument is that the fashion world isn't as frivolous as it might seem.

"Look at the killings in the fashion world during the last years," he said, citing specifically the 1997 shooting death of designer Gianni Versace. "There's a lot of criminal activity. The fashion world is so strongly connected with the drug world. It's a world of power."

Bringing in a major designer, however, would take up most of the production's moderate-by-opera-standards $1.4 million budget. Though St. Clair found many of the characters' costumes while "power shopping" - his term - at Franklin Mills mall, local fashion programs were asked whether their students would like to design costumes for the runway show that is the plot's Act I flash point. Among the chosen designs, three came from Philadelphia University, four from Moore College of Art, and nine from Drexel University.

Going through them on a laptop, St. Clair is clearly pleased with the student talent, though anyone not involved with the fashion world might require a translator. He talks about colors like "acid green" and fashion riffs on "Elizabethan pumpkin hose."

The Montagues (the edgier of the two fashion houses) will infiltrate the Capulets' masked ball in disguise as white-haired Karl Lagerfeld look-alikes. (Who's he? A designer whose personal look is so distinctive that people dress up like him for Halloween).

"We said [to students] that we wanted things that had a wink toward Italian fashion," said St. Clair. "Manfred brought in a fashion magazine with Lady Gaga wrapped in yellow tape. He liked the lettering and graffiti. He wanted everything to have a level of exaggeration. We wanted these kids to go over the top." (Their payment: program credit and the fun of being let loose in St. Clair's fabric workshop.)

OCP has a mixed record with high-concept productions - and a subscriber base not known for great patience with them. But any fear of up-in-arms purists is tempered by the possibility that, in this case, there aren't any. Gounod's middlebrow adaptation of Shakespeare has long been a fringe item on the standard repertoire. It's produceable and singable, but hardly the kind of work that inspires people to protect its integrity.

The essential characteristic of the Shakespeare original is that of senseless tragedy. The fashion world has a capacity for senselessness, but tragedy?

Schweigkofler has no doubt about that: "It's the story of a big love. But when you put this big love in the bigger world of economy, this love becomes tiny and vulnerable." (To underscore that quality, he wanted Bloomberg News-style commentary running along the bottom of the stage, but it proved too difficult to execute.)

What stumped him momentarily was how to handle the characters who are threatened with exile. What does that mean in modern times? House arrest in Cherry Hill?

"When the media and press is not taking notice of you," says Schweigkofler, "this is the modern exile."

How that translates into the production remains to be seen.