At the height of her career, her brand was a must-have for young women taking their first steps into designer party gear; a Betsey dress was a rite of passage, a wearable bridge to adolescence. Her taste seemed to spring as much from her tenure at Mademoiselle , among white-gloved editrixes, as it did from her later associations with rock and roll. Paul Young, an entrepreneur from London, was launching a new store on Madison Avenue called Paraphernalia, and was looking for unknown designers to feature.
It was a little A-line with large, strategically placed brass grommets sewn into it, exposing your skin. Johnson met the members of the Velvet Underground, who were patrons of the store, and began a breakneck romance with John Cale; they married in , the same year that Cale left the group, and divorced not long after. She was wearing bright-yellow hair extensions, which gave her head a chartreuse glow, a pink sweater with a large embroidered eye on it, and a dark rim of kohl eyeliner.
A giant, vintage Betsey Johnson gown in cherry-red tulle, draped over a chair in the corner of the room, looked like a saloon costume from an old Western. Winningly daffy and unfiltered, and prone to reminiscing, she told me about the time she spent living in a downtown loft with Cale, making clothing for the Velvets.
The judge initially refused to perform the ceremony because Johnson was wearing a pants suit of her own design; she solved the problem by walking to the restroom, removing her pants, and wiggling her jacket down over her tights. But she left the company a few years later, breaking her contract six months early. In , she launched her own label with a business partner, a fashion sales rep and former model named Chantal Bacon. Johnson gave Bacon half the company up front. A year later, she opened her first namesake store, on Thompson Street, in Soho.
Johnson began showing at every New York Fashion Week, ending all of her runway presentations by doing a cartwheel. Daryl Hannah wore a velvet Betsey dress dotted with rosebuds to an Oscars party.
Rock stars bought the clothes. She was one of the first women in fashion to sell not just clothes but a life style. Going into Betsey Johnson stores, which were all painted the same shade of blaring pink, felt like walking inside a hoydenish carnival; it may not have been sophisticated, but it was fun.
She seemed to be inviting her customers to an endless slumber party. In , Johnson was pulling in more than a hundred and fifty million dollars per year in sales and overseeing sixty-six stores in the United States. But Bacon was ready to move on, and so the two women decided to sell a majority stake in the company, to the Boston-based private-equity firm Castanea Partners.
Johnson stayed on as creative director of the brand, but she was no longer her own boss. The whole thing was such a nightmare. Where were clothes at the time? I just felt so lucky that we sold. We worked our asses off for 35 years and just barely had the money. I could never find anything I liked but I could always cut and sew. I never took a fashion course. You should see my high school pictures.
Navy blue high neck sweaters, pearls, short hair, no makeup. Do I have any regrets? About three and a half husbands, yes. I am a worrywart, though. I remember hearing Ralph Lauren say, years ago, that you operate when you are scared. But honestly, I have not felt the years coming along. I recently read an article about hating to age and I realized how it added up from the kid I had, the grandkids I had, the boyfriend and husbands I had, the counselors I went through, the traveling I did, the working.
You know, work always saved me. It was the only time in my life where I forced myself to find balance — personal and external. Work took priority over everything. Every man, every issue. I think [the industry is] too huge and too fast. Make it, wear it, be your own guinea pig, have your friends wear it, and at the end of the day, would you buy it? Feel happy to be alive.
I believe you do have to drum up your happiness. Staying positive and optimistic is necessary to function. And I think you have to have a dream. You have to have a personal vision and go for that. Zero in on something. I just love living. I love being alive. And boy do you love it more when you get older. I like that I made myself into what I want to be at my age. By Harling Ross. By Mallory Rice.
By Michael Gonzalez. By Beth Sacca. By Nili Blanck. Search Clear Search. Photo by Susan Wood via Getty Images.
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