Betsey Johnson: A Role Model, Still

Fifty years ago, the designer Betsey Johnson — part rebel, part cheerleader — got herself from proper Connecticut to New York City, as many a respectable female adventurer was wont to do. She arrived in Manhattan by way of a 1964 Mademoiselle magazine guest editorship. (She was in good company: Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath preceded her.) But that wasn’t the New York she was searching for. She had been staying at the white-gloved Barbizon Hotel for Women, and knew there was another New York. Soon she found it: the dark new bohemia that was just then supplanting the earnest folk-singing scene of Macdougal Street. She was home.

This world, dripping with dissoluteness and a belief in the redemptive value of danger, coincided with the debut of a revolutionary new clothing consortium called Paraphernalia. Ms. Johnson, hiding her normalcy under a stark Vidal Sassoon haircut and layers of fake eyelashes, became its star designer. Her dresses were fairy-tale clothes for girls who skipped on the wild side.And as a soon-to-be regular wearer of those dresses, I would add that we wanted to walk wild for some emotional good, not tragic ill, we expected to get out of it all — for some incandescence in our souls that would match the incandescent in those dresses.

It’s hard to describe just how Ms. Johnson’s clothes defined us, but let me try. For one, they amped up the youthquake gimmick of the time, but they also shifted gears and went romantic, with voluminous sleeves and ribboned, shirred necklines — apt, since coming to New York alone and female was all about romance. They toggled from skimpy silver minis (perfect for discothèques like the Electric Circus and the Scene) to ankle-length skirts that acknowledged the new counterculture’s fondness for medieval gowns. Edie Sedgwick was a fitting model; Julie Christie, an avid customer.

A trip to London “flipped my whole thing,” remembers Ms. Johnson, now 72, as we talk in her West 30s showroom. Racks of clothes are everywhere; dozens of tutus suspended on ceiling hooks; her eyes bright beneath her egg-yoke-yellow-striped mop of glossy vanilla hair. She was dazzled by the “sexy and edgy and romantic” Biba boutique, run by the Polish designer Barbara Hulanicki. She waited in line the two hours it often took to get into Biba each day and marveled at “the Edwardian high hats and glamorous, feminine ‘Elvira Madigan’ gowns and the Art Nouveau prints and the tight Lurex turtlenecks.”

At Paraphernalia, Ms. Johnson’s first hit was a set of three nylon microskirts: Day-Glo pink, green and yellow, crunched up in a tennis-ball can. Then came her silver motorcycle jacket. In the mid-to-late 1960s, her clothes punched your membership ticket in a chick elite: not for us, the coming-to-New York of that older generation, with “straight” jobs, roommates in high-rises and a thirst for engagement rings.

She would push on and prevail, all the way through to this current decade. (How many people have had a steady design career for 50 years?) Breast cancer wouldn’t stop her. Three divorces wouldn’t stop her. Nor would single motherhood — her daughter, Lulu, 39, is her best friend. Chapter 11 wouldn’t stop her, in a business that “builds you up and spits you out and knocks you down,” as Fern Mallis, the former executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America describes the industry. “She just endures,” Ms. Mallis said. “She keeps on ticking.”

Ms. Johnson branded herself long before others: She’d made the ballet skirt over a leotard her signature dress, and she made her spiky white-blond hair and huge, red-lipped smile her signature look. She performed a cartwheel at the end of her runway shows (she does to this day). She racked up accolades: the Coty Award, the Pratt Institute Award, the CFDA’s Tireless Talent Award, several lifetime achievement prizes.

With her new business partner, the shoe king Steve Madden, and as creative director of her namesake brand (whose name Mr. Madden purchased in 2010), she is licensing dresses, sleepwear, jewelry, bedding, handbags, footwear, fragrance. She just did a stint on “Dancing With the Stars.”

Ms. Johnson designed for good girls who wanted to seem wild but who could turn back at zero hour, girls who knew that no adventure was really dangerous as long as you kept your wits and your work ethic. We wanted to bury our ingénue selves, and she became one of the first New York women at a very convenient noir moment when the available means for such burial were copious — as were, if you were smart and lucky, the means for self-reclamation. She found them both. And then, like any good seamstress, she cut the pattern for the rest of us.

A version of this article appears in print on February 15, 2015, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Role Model, Still. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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