Blooming good time on the red carpet

LOS ANGELES — You can say one thing about Grammy fashion: It's never modest.

The Grammy red carpet lit up with fashions from smokin' hot to just plain odd.

Minis were micro, and flesh was in no short supply: Hilary Duff in a lingerie-style Dolce & Gabbana and Fergie in a silver metallic Badgley Mischka Couture led the charge against good taste.

And on the weird end of the spectrum, the band OK Go looked to be impersonating a curtain. Imogen Heap dressed like a goth Mary Poppins under grow lights.

If there was a bit of a fashion trend, it was metallic outfits, including those worn by Carrie Underwood, Natasha Bedingfield and Petra Nemcova, who escorted James Blunt. (Blunt bypassed a suit for a pair of jeans but had one of the evening's best accessories: a supermodel girlfriend.)

Even Jamie Foxx was a little bit flashy in a silver jacket. Justin Timberlake, co-designer of a menswear line, toned the silver down a notch to gray, in a Prada one-button tuxedo with a white shirt and army green tie with gray stars.

Beyoncé won the Barbie award, wearing no less than three dresses in two hours: one on the red carpet, one on stage for her performance and a third to accept her award for best contemporary R&B album ("B'Day").

Scarlett Johansson, a Grammys presenter, wore a navy-and-black cocktail dress with a fitted corset by Monique Lhuillier. LeAnn Rimes also wore a Lhuillier design — a dark purple, deep V-neck gown with a turquoise-and-gold beaded waist.

Jennifer Hudson played the part of a siren in a red, form-fitting halter gown by Roberto Cavalli, while Mandy Moore went the opposite route, in sort of a folksy colorful gown and loose, wavy hair.

But Heap's look out-Björk'd everyone on the red carpet. She wore lily pads on her dress, and grass appeared to grow out of her hair. She also carried with her a toy frog called Gary the Grammy frog.

"A fabulous designer from Los Angeles got in touch with me via MySpace asking me if she could make my Grammy dress, and this is what happened," Heap said.