January 25, 1989

LEAD: Few designers ever lost caste by overestimating the demand for sexy clothes. As the spring and summer couture openings continue here, Emanuel Ungaro, no stranger to the genre, achieved the apogee of seductive dressing this season. He did it with flower prints, flaring skirts, open necklines, petticoats and tiny waistlines: all the classic appurtenances of appealing femininity.

LEAD: ALTHOUGH people don't usually rhapsodize at cocktail parties about great bean dishes they have enjoyed lately, that is beginning to change. As new varieties of dried beans arrive on the market, and research unveils ever greater nutritional properties, beans are finding passionate advocates among culinarians.

LEAD: Trader Vic's, the Polynesian bar in the Plaza that has played host to generations of moneyed gadabouts, prep school students on R&R and fans of its Samoan Fog Cutters, has ''gotten tacky'' and will be closed, the hotel's owner, Donald J. Trump, said yesterday.

LEAD: In one of his final acts as Secretary of State, George P. Shultz argued that the United States should in effect reward the Soviet Union for a timely withdrawal from Afghanistan by easing trade controls imposed when Soviet forces swept into the country, senior Administration officials said today.

LEAD: In an unusually direct statement, Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said today that the nation's inflation rate was unacceptably high and that he would seek to reduce it.