Live-Wire Designer Plugs In to California Clientele

Betsey Johnson kneels on the floor of her new Melrose Avenue boutique--all white fingernails, black fishnets and burgundy splotched hair. Close by are her bag of trail mix and the junk-shop toys she wants to glue onto her bubblegum-pink walls.

“Could you put on something like Joni Mitchell?” the 42-year-old designer shouts over a blaring Patti Smith tape.

Johnson, whose rock ‘n’ roll, live-wire designs recall the shapes and colors of the ‘60s, came to Los Angeles this week to open her 1,000-square-foot storefront boutique. She has three Betsey Johnson shops in New York City, and last year tested the L.A. climate with a showroom at the California Mart.

“Most of my stuff is for emotional buying,” the designer says of the bright floral dresses hanging in her store. These are clothes for “competitive singles,” she explains, and for the nightclub circuit. They’re “I-gotta-feel-great-tonight clothes.”

But Johnson thinks some of her designs are more toned down than usual this year: “My family finally will wear my clothes,” says the former fashion illustrator, who has been designing on and off since the ‘60s and who likes to think her designs wait for definition from the wearer.

“They can look real Lean-Cuisine-y or voluptuous-round,” she says. “They’re like little cookie-cutters, until the body and the personality make the dress.”

Though the new boutique is filled with her winter fare, Johnson has completed her colorful spring line, which ranges from a schoolgirl floral slip dress (the product of her “cornball Connecticut background,” she says) to a double-knit pink-and-orange mini-dress that Goldie Hawn could have worn during her “Rowan & Martin Laugh-In” days.

Johnson uses such ‘60s emblems as zippers, hooks, cutouts, sleeveless turtleneck tops and miniskirts for spring. But she also creates a long, stretchy jersey dress, a crushed velvet blazer and a narrow black strapless dress. Not a cohesive group, she admits.

“I just have too many ideas that don’t fit together,” she says.

These ideas come in part from MTV, which Johnson says she watches from her Tribecca flat in Manhattan more often than she watches the news. MTV represents her customer, she says, recalling that in earlier days she had to glance at a “Cosmo” to find her type.

In the late afternoon light, her type walks in: women in their 20s and 30s who look as though they never had to worry about dressing for the office. As they finger through racks, Johnson returns to her rubber dinosaurs, marbles, feathers and pipe cleaners, gluing them to hunks of wood that will serve as picture frames in the shop. Johnson won’t let anyone else touch the decorating.

“Anything visual,” she says, “I’ve just got to do it.”