If stereotypes still linger about fashion as an industry of the self-serious and the unaware, few have done so much to combat that notion as Betsey Johnson has over the course of her four-decade-plus career. In her early 20s with her work at Paraphernalia, she helped to shape the looks of Factory denizens like Edie Sedgwick and John Cale. Later, in the face of the folky aesthetic leanings of the ’70s, she proposed the acid-hued, the form-fitting, stretchy, and comfortable. The biz’s best cartwheeler (she does one instead of taking the standard runway bow), she put an approachable, candy-colored spin on punk sensibilities and offered up a flirtatious vision of feminist dressing: active, easy, affordable, and unapologetic.
Next Monday, the Council of Fashion Designers of America will present Johnson with its Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award. In honor of this recognition, Style.com spoke to nine of the people who have known Johnson best, from the Velvet Underground’s John Cale to Cyndi Lauper, Patricia Field, and even Edie Locke, the legendary Mademoiselle editor whom Johnson dubbed her “fashion mommy.” Read on for a portrait of Johnson in their own words.
Johnson was born into Waspy anonymity in Terryville, Connecticut. Like Sylvia Plath before her, young Betsey came to New York to cut her teeth as one of Mademoiselle magazine’s guest editors in 1964. Working in the art department, she handled layouts and photo work with her now-signature joie de vivre, and made no small impression on her colleagues.
Edie Locke, former editor in chief of Mademoiselle: “She was this wonderfully crazy, bubbly blond. You couldn’t be unhappy around her. We had a shopping column where we would put items that we thought were great to buy and not much money. Betsey made a wonderful little top in a silvery knit, and Faye Dunaway ordered it. At that point it was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ All of us obviously got them made.”
Opportunity soon came knocking in the form of Paraphernalia, Paul Young’s just-launched youthquake fashion line that aimed to bring a touch of Swinging London to modish Manhattanites.
Edie Locke: “[Paul Young] called Mademoiselle, looking for a designer, and we felt that we really shouldn’t hold Betsey back, and so we recommended her and she went to work for him as a designer.”
Fall 1965 saw the opening bash for Paraphernalia’s Madison Avenue flagship, where, thanks to the machinations of Andy Warhol, a who’s who of downtown royalty turned out to raise a glass.
John Cale, musician, founding member of The Velvet Underground, and Johnson’s ex-husband: “[The Velvet Underground] were asked to come play at the opening. It was one of those crazy things that Andy was always partial to—he’d just throw a band in the middle of anything. It was this white store with boxes and marble. They asked us to play, and we didn’t want to play, they asked us to play again, we said we don’t want to play…It was sort of a testy situation, but the clothes were really stunning. It was recognizable to me that something different was going on in New York, very street-oriented, bustling with energy. So Betsey came and did some clothes for us. My aesthetic at the time was all black—black waistcoat, black turtleneck, black pants, and that was my comfort range. Then Betsey came along and—‘Hey, velvet! Oh, man, yeah, I’d like to get some velvet!’ She made herself a pinstripe suit, and I said, ‘Can I have a pinstripe suit?’ ‘No, you can’t have a pinstripe suit.’ ‘All right, well, can I have a black velvet suit, please?’ ‘Yes.’ Sterling [Morrison] got a beautiful deep forest green velvet suit, and Moe [Tucker] had a black one, and Lou [Reed] had a gray leather suit.”
Johnson would soon become a fixture of the Warhol-Max’s Kansas City crowd. Edie Sedgwick lent her boyish frame to Johnson’s designs, serving as an early fit model, and Sedgwick was allegedly wearing one of the designer’s color-blocked dresses when she nodded off and nearly burned down her Chelsea Hotel pad. During Johnson’s time designing at Paraphernalia, though, she flourished, and also met Barbara Washburn, better known as Bunky, with whom she’d soon strike out on her own.
Barbara “Bunky” Washburn, former business partner and cofounder of Betsey Bunky Nini: “She was an instant star [at Paraphernalia]. I’ve never seen anyone able to do things so quickly, so focused, and so sweet and cheerful. She knew exactly where she was going. She was a phenomena.”
John Cale: “As I got to know her, I wondered how she had so much energy. I got a clue because she told me she was a cheerleader. She said, ‘I was the first one on the field, out in front of the team,’ so I got this impression that if you’ve got a team of 300-pounders following you out, it really focuses your mind on keeping ahead of the pack!”
But by 1969, with professional frustrations brewing and the mid-’60s youthquake style beginning to wane, Johnson and Washburn were ready to leave Young’s label.
Barbara “Bunky” Washburn: “Paraphernalia was a very crazy place to work. It was really hard to work with people who were out of it [on drugs], so we decided we could figure something out on our own—which was silly, but it worked out. We raised the money and opened the store on 53rd Street. There was always one room in the store that was just Betsey’s designs, and that was a big draw when we opened.”
The shop was Betsey Bunky Nini, a converted brownstone on 53rd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. Washburn did the buying, Johnson turned out original designs, and third partner Anita Latour handled the business side of things. In “her” room, Johnson painted a mural, while other rooms were covered in splashy rose wallpaper—an element that would come to be a signature of Johnson’s eponymous shops later on. Her designs hung alongside the likes of Ossie Clark, Pablo & Delia, and Kenzo—and were already earning attention for their ease of wear. In the October 27, 1969 edition of the Chicago Tribune_, in his coverage of the just-opened boutique, Bill Cunningham wrote: “The armholes of Miss Johnson’s dresses were cut so deeply into the shoulder line that the dress never moved out of position when hands were raised straight over the head. [She] credited Charles James for helping her with this construction.”_
Barbara “Bunky” Washburn: “Because we didn’t have to have fabrics that you could buy in bulk, at one point she made skirts and jackets out of old chenille bedspreads. She made something for me that she called the Scarlett O’Hara Dress. We had gone to see Gone With the Wind—Anita, myself, and Betsey—and she made me this three-tiered dress with all of these ruffles and a fitted top. It was always that wonderful Betsey look. Her involvement in the store is what brought us so much immediate publicity.”
Johnson’s reputation indeed took off, and at the start of the ’70s she lent her inimitable eye to Alley Cat, where she became head designer and her vibrant frocks and quirky intarsia knits earned her a Coty Award, making her then the youngest talent to ever earn that prize.
Patricia Field_,_ designer, owner of a legendary eponymous shop, longtime friend, and early Alley Cat stockist: “Knitted sweaters and dresses, that’s what I remember the most. Sweaters with cats knitted in and other imagery. They were tight in the body and tight in the sleeve and they had a little poof in the shoulder. She was hot on fire. I have a young clientele, and Betsey was one of the leading designers of the young girls.”
By the mid-’70s, Johnson’s involvement in Betsey Bunky Nini was lessening as she focused on her other design pursuits.
Barbara “Bunky” Washburn: “We moved the shop to Madison Avenue in 1975, and by that time she was busy with other things, and she gradually moved on.”
Kim Hastreiter, cofounder and co-editor in chief of Paper magazine, former Betsey Bunky Nini salesgirl, and window dresser: “I just moved to New York to be an artist out of school, and I needed a job. I had a friend from art school and she told me that this store, Betsey Bunky Nini, uptown, loved to hire artists. I went in and met with the owner, Bunky. I think Betsey and the other partner [Anita Latour] were kind of like—they were still partners, but they weren’t working there. Bunky was kind of from a blue-chip-type family, and she had this mother who we all called Mummy. Mummy had this big apartment on Park Avenue. She would always hold a Christmas party for the store, and Betsey would always come. That’s really how I started meeting Betsey. It was like a very Waspy kind of Christmas party, and Betsey would always drag some crazy, you know, stoned boyfriend along.”
But perhaps Johnson’s best match came when she met Chantal Bacon, who would quickly become her confidante and business partner.
Chantal Bacon, longtime friend and former business partner and Betsey Johnson CEO: “I was living in London from ’70 to ’75. I actually knew John Cale’s second wife, so I’d always heard about his first wife, that she was a designer in New York. I met Betsey, and it turned out we knew a lot of people in common from London, and we just kind of clicked. She said, ‘Do you want to go into business?’”
Patricia Field: “Betsey is an artist, a designer—she is not really a businesswoman. She’s got generosity, a good heart, she is positive, happy, creative, and she was getting abused by these commercial companies. And then she met Chantal and the two of them started from ground zero and they built that business. Chantal was the perfect person for Betsey because she was the businessperson, the organizer. They were a match made in heaven, and together they made that a fantastic success.”
In 1978, the Betsey Johnson label was born.
Chantal Bacon: “I had no idea what I was doing, and we just kind of jumped into it. She was the patternmaker, I was the fitting model, I did all the production and sales and everything. And we kind of learned as we went. Our first collection was red-and-black stripes and white-and-black stripes, and it was all cotton Lycra. I did projections, and I thought, _Well, if there are 50 states, there’s got to be at least 10 girls in each state..._Which was completely crazy. I never did that again; that was a real lesson in making cutting tickets. Starting out, we had a big department of Fiorucci. We didn’t really sell [to] department stores because they didn’t even know where to put us. We opened our store in Soho because we just needed another place to sell. It was one of those teeny, little stores on Thompson Street. If we had more than two customers, the salesgirl would have to leave the store ’cause three people couldn’t actually fit in there.”
Fern Mallis, former executive director of the CFDA and fashion consultant: “The Betsey Johnson stores, when they started to exist, were so much about Betsey’s personality: the atmosphere, the colors, the fixturing, the flower prints. You knew a Betsey storefront; it was like nothing else.”
No less distinctive were Johnson’s already-famous runway extravaganzas, for which she’d often recruit scenesters and friends from downtown haunts like the Mudd Club.
Chantal Bacon: “We would go to the Mudd Club every single night. We’d go to work, come home, and have a disco nap from 6 until 11, and then go out.”
Kim Hastreiter: “I would see Betsey, and she asked me to be in one of her fashion shows, at a roller rink, and it was on Waverly Place. I didn’t know how to roller skate, and I was so scared. But all the girls would just hold on to the girl in front of you and made a giant choo-choo train. It was like a band.”
Lulu Johnson, daughter: “From a very early age, I noticed that my mom was not the same [as other moms]. It was hard. When you’re young, you just want to fade into the background; you definitely don’t want to be different than your girlfriends at 8 years old. I remember going to school every day with my mom and Chantal in the taxicab, and they would wear these huge fishnets and I would poke their skin in and out of the fishnets. I grew up around the petticoats and the fishnets and the cotton Lycra and all that stuff. I was always at her runway shows, whether it was backstage or onstage.”
Chantal Bacon: “After the show, she always goes, ‘Oh, I don’t know how I’m going to top this show. This is the best show! I have no idea [how] I’m going to top it.’ And then she comes up with another idea. And for her, just showing clothes isn’t enough. She needs to entertain, and she feels, ‘Who would want to just come look at clothes?’”
Kim Hastreiter: “[It was] this certain silhouette, and it was always really active—you could dance, you could play your guitar. You could go crazy, you could roller skate [in it].”
John Cale: “She was a gymnast, and all of that works into the clothing, the comfort level.”
Cyndi Lauper, musician: “On my very first trip to Europe as a singer-writer for Blue Angel, I bought a Betsey Johnson hot-pink sweater with zippers all along the front of it. It was pink punk. And it was an affordable, fashionable sweater I could wear as a rocker, on my first rock-and-roll tour in Europe. I never forgot the way that sweater made me feel.”
Chantal Bacon: “MTV was a huge thing, because all of a sudden, everyone all over America could see what was going on in the music scene. Music and clothes have always been connected, but I think this gave a visual to everybody really quickly across the country.”
Cyndi Lauper: “[Betsey] helped even middle America get a little funky and sexy.”
Chantal Bacon: “In our first collection or second collection, Bergdorf gave us windows. And I remember Diana Ross and the band came in and bought all the stuff off the mannequins.”
Counting the likes of Lauper and Ross among her customer base, Johnson’s punky young business grew steadily over the ’80s, eventually including bags and shoes, but never losing sight of the design DNA at its core.
Kim Hastreiter: “Chantal was brilliant. She let Betsey be Betsey, and she made really amazing business. They had a million stores all over. That was a great partnership.
“[Betsey] never gets panicked about trends or any of that stuff. That’s why the fashion industry is hard on people like that, because they just want the new trend, the shiny toy, and then you throw it away. The other thing is she does it for women. She’s such a feminist, in a way, even though she wants a boyfriend all the time. She makes clothes for women.”
But the path to success was far from unfettered. In 1999, the designer was diagnosed with breast cancer after one of her saline implants burst, and later underwent a lumpectomy, handling the illness with a quintessentially Johnson-like candidness.
Lulu Johnson: “She found out at a Christmas party, and I was the only one who knew that she was getting tests. She was getting radiation treatment every day and really had to keep up her strength emotionally and physically throughout that. And only the two of us knew, so I had to take on this motherly role with her in that; I never cried in front of her...because she would really freak out every once in a while. Our relationship really got stronger over that period of time. You look at life in a new and different way. She ended up telling Fern Mallis.”
Fern Mallis: “I was at CFDA, and she came to share that news with me when the only other person who had known it was Lulu. We sat in my office, and we both hugged and cried, and I loved that she trusted me to come talk about it and figure out how to go forward and to handle it in the industry.”
Lulu Johnson: “Together they made an announcement. The next day she was on the cover of the Post, and then it was all over the place.”
Fern Mallis: “A lot of designers and people in the industry were always afraid to acknowledge any kind of illness, thinking that customers will shy away for some reason, but I think that that was a really pivotal point in her career and in her life. And thank God she’s been fine ever since, and she didn’t need those implants again, and she’s happy to be flat-chested and alive.”
By the mid-aughts, Betsey Johnson’s annual sales were topping out at $150 million, and it seemed that the brand’s decidedly un-corporate way of doing business had paid off.
Chantal Bacon: “We never really borrowed money and we never had investors, so we did it all ourselves in a very organic growth. We started with one store, and then by the time we sold in 2008, we had 65 stores, and distribution in Japan, as well.”
Lulu Johnson: “She definitely involved me in everything she did. I started working as a salesgirl when I was 14, in the summertime. At 19 I started doing PR for her company, then I worked for the majority of my 20s in the showroom. I was involved in everything, from styling the shows, hiring the models, merchandising. It was such a family environment. The real pattern and way of her company was that people started as salesgirls and then ended up running the East or West Coast division of retail or wholesale, so I grew up around all these women who were definitely the men in the family in that they brought home the bacon.”
In 2007, Johnson and Bacon sold a majority stake in the company to a private equity firm in the interest of expanding and opening new stores, but three years later the economic depression had taken its toll, sales had slumped, and the brand was poised to default on a $48 million loan. Steve Madden bought the debt, but not before Bacon stepped down as CEO of the Betsey Johnson company.
Chantal Bacon: “We had been doing it for, what, 35 years, 30 years? It just felt time to change. I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I wanted to experience something else.”
Patricia Field: “You put out so many years and you build something, and sometimes you just get tired of the grind and you want to change your life. But you know it became a problem for Betsey because she couldn’t replace Chantal.”
In spring 2012, the brand filed for bankruptcy, shuttering all of its shops and suffering significant layoffs.
Lulu Johnson: “I think that she was scared. It was definitely sad to lose the stores because it was still very family-like. Walking around the city, you would see the stores and you could know the girls...it was this clan of people that were like family, and to lose that was just very bizarre. It was the end of an era.”
Chantal Bacon: “It was really hard for her, because it’s her baby, and we had such an incredible group of girls that worked in the stores. It was such a close-knit group.”
But as surely as Johnson cartwheels down the catwalk season after season, year after year, she bounced back from Chapter 11—in this case with a reality show on the Style Network, XOX Betsey Johnson_, centering on her relationship with her daughter and rebuilding under Steve Madden, post-bankruptcy._
Chantal Bacon: “Oh, I was mortified! [laughs] Well, you know, they had asked [us to do a reality show] for years, while we had a company, and I would always say, ‘Absolutely not.’ So as soon as I was out of the picture, then that was the green light, I guess, to go!”
Lulu Johnson: “I would never do it again. I was going through a divorce, her company had just gone bankrupt, and Steve Madden had taken over, and so we were both definitely in phases where we were so open with each other and with others about what was going on in our life, it just seemed like, ‘Yeah, this is an interesting time in our life, who knows.’ But, you know, reality TV is definitely not reality. They had to come up with a beginning, middle, and an end. We went on this trip to Japan and we were so excited to be in Japan together, and the first thing they did was come in and say, ‘We just want to let you know that by the end of this trip, you two are supposed to be having this huge fight.’ It was really horrible, it was really terrible to have to do that. It went against my grain every step of the way.”
Today, Steve Madden owns the licensing and intellectual property of the Betsey Johnson brand, while Johnson serves as a creative director and oversees all licenses, from jewelry to sunglasses. She continues to design a ready-to-wear brand and stage her storied runway extravaganzas each season.
Fern Mallis: “She’s been very positive about Steve Madden and what he’s doing to the business, and the Betsey Johnson brand and label are still very much out there. It was a sad moment when she had to realize how her legions of fans reacted when the stores were closing, and I don’t think she really realized how much impact she had on that customer. But she didn’t let that take away any of her enthusiasm or love and creativity.”
Lulu Johnson: “I think she has realized over almost 10 years with Steve that she is still able to have those creative outlets and that she is still needed. You could look at it two ways, but the positive way to look at it is that it has really helped to keep her brand alive.”
Kim Hastreiter: “She just is this force of nature that can’t help it. Her environment, where she lives, her furniture, her kitchen, how she eats—everything is like one thing, it’s all under one umbrella. She eats licorice and popcorn, probably for dinner, you know what I mean?”
Fern Mallis: “It’s not like she said, ‘Oh, I’m not getting that kind of press from this magazine or that magazine, so I’ll have to switch my designs.’ Betsey just knew who she was working for, who her customer was. She still looks like one of the girls that fell in love with her and her clothes in the ’70s and the ’80s and the ’90s. She hasn’t taken out her extensions or changed her clothes and decided to walk away quietly. She’s still there, and she’s still having a good time.”
Kim Hastreiter: “And she still gets it up. She still gets excited about doing it. I’m glad she’s winning this award, because she deserves it. Oh, my God, please—she’s the hardest-working girl in show business.”