Is betsey johnson still alive
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Betsey Johnson on the Eve of a Cotton Lycra Revolution
By 1977 I had been freelancing for almost four years, and it just wasn’t doing the trick anymore. Even though I did have my name on some of the labels, it didn’t feel like the real thing. I was getting tired of designing what was essentially someone else’s vision.
One afternoon, while having a drink with my good friend, and favorite designer, Giorgio Sant’Angelo at Bill’s Bar in the Garment District I was going on and on about how I felt as if I wasn’t moving forward in my career. I was frustrated because I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and nobody seemed willing to hire me for that. He told me flat out,“Betsey, no one is going to do this for you. You need to do it for yourself. If I were you, I would just design a line, plan a fashion show, and announce you’re back.”
Coming from Giorgio, this was a major statement. He was such a gentle man, and I never saw him get his feathers ruffled. But he seemed adamant about this, so he must have meant business. Or he could have
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Betsey Johnson
(1942-)
Who Is Betsey Johnson?
Betsey Johnson grew up with a passion for dance and art. Her fashion career skyrocketed when her avant garde designs became part of the 1960s "Youthquake" movement. In the 70s, however, her career slumped until the punk rock style inspired her to create fashion for a new generation. Johnson opened a boutique in New York's Soho neighborhood, eventually followed by more than 60 stores worldwide.
Early Life
Fashion designer Betsey Johnson was born on August 10, 1942, in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Johnson grew up in the nearby town of Terryville as a child, where she indulged in her two greatest loves: drawing and dance. She had a precocious talent for art, and throughout her youth, she trained in various styles of dance. In fact, it was a combination of these two interests that eventually led Johnson to fashion designing. She loved the elaborate costumes she wore for her dance recitals and spent many long afternoons sketching costume ideas. "What I tried to do was a combination of dance and art," she recalls.
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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
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