East Meets Melrose : Fashion: Designer Rachel London has captivated Japanese investors. She joins a growing list of Americans who’ve done so.

You can catch Los Angeles fashion designer Rachel London’s styles in an exhibit at the Louvre next year. Or turn on MTV right now and view one of her body-hugging “flower power” outfits in LL Cool J’s music video “Big Ole Butt.”

Here in Los Angeles, you can visit Rachel London’s Garden, the designer’s eye-popping boutique on Melrose Avenue. The store has become known as a spot that provides celebrity provocateurs such as Madonna, Lisa Bonet and Sandra Bernhard with clothes to wear on television. (When Bernhard appeared on “Late Night With David Letterman,” he looked at her dress and asked, “Is it flameproof?”)

But if you really want to take in the full spectrum of London’s typically flower-laden designs, the best bet may be to wait a while and check out what happens when there’s some real money behind her work.

At this point, she’s still self-financed. But sometime next year, the Japanese are expected to begin marketing her unique and ebullient sense of style in their country.

According to London, her Asian investors have big plans for her. They want to open a store filled with her playful designs and model it after her totally unorthodox Los Angeles boutique--complete with a bed as the store’s centerpiece.

London has joined a growing list of unlikely young American designers whose names are not yet household words in the United States--or anywhere else--but whose talents have nonetheless caught the eye of Japanese investors. They want to set these promising names up with boutiques in Japan, even though they may not have any financial backers or stores of their own at home.

Indeed, when London signed to do business with a Japanese firm (which she has agreed not to name until the store opens), she had no plans to open her own shop and was content to wholesale her collection to department stores and boutiques, which sold the clothes that retail in the $200-to-$300 range.

Now the designer has visions of her eccentric boutique on a busy street in Kyoto. When it opens, it is likely to have all the trappings of her second-floor Melrose store. There, shoppers walk up posy-laden stairs. (London lined them with poinsettia lights usually found on Christmas trees and riveted silk wildflowers into the carpet so it looks as if the path has been strewn with flowers.)

Upstairs, visitors get a glimpse of London’s kitchen (decorated with rainbow paint and more flowers). Finally, there’s the shop-apartment’s main room, in which the ceiling is nearly as striking as the bed--it’s completely laced with delicate silk magnolia blossoms.

Near the window looking out on Melrose are white Victorian lawn chairs covered with what London calls “flower fur” (flowers jammed together to create a stole of endless petals). The chairs enthrone two large Snoopy dolls, for which London has created floral outfits much like those she designs for humans. (The dolls and their costumes are her ticket to being exhibited in the Louvre next year; she’s been asked to participate in a show commemorating Snoopy’s 40th birthday.)

The Carmen Miranda of Melrose reports that her investors have been taking lots of photographs and measuring things exactly, with plans to reproduce the store faithfully.

Her marketing agent, Steve Feinberg, director of ITM Corp., a Torrance-based firm that consults on Japan-U.S. trade, explains: “The idea is to give the Japanese consumer the look and the feeling that they’re walking into Rachel London’s Garden just as it is on Melrose.”

Feinberg, who met London through a mutual friend in Los Angeles a little over a year ago, thinks that London’s exuberantly sexy interpretation of ‘60s flower-power styles is ideal for the Japanese market.

“I immediately thought (London’s look) was exotic enough,” he recalls. “There’s a niche in the Japanese mind-set that just loves the flavor of exotica that Rachel has. The Japanese are attracted to something that’s unique and Western in flavor.”

At the opposite extreme of the design spectrum, New York-based classicist Carmelo Pomodoro had his first boutique opened for him this past October, in Tokyo, not Manhattan.

Sometimes called a “New Age Calvin Klein,” Pomodoro was set up with a sleek, ultramodern “neo-Palladian style” shop, “an absolute showcase” that he helped the architect design. The store is expected to be the first in a series and was financed by Takashimaya, a leading Japanese retail chain.

“The Japanese have a reputation for taking things and improving them,” Pomodoro says. “But now, they are going to the original source of talent and becoming partners with it--instead of buying it outright or trying to redo it themselves.”

Like London, he has been popular with the U.S. fashion press though his name may not yet be well-known to most consumers.

Pomodoro sees the increasing sophistication of Japanese customers as responsible for the trend to U.S.-Japanese design partnerships that result in stores: “The customer in Japan has gotten very savvy. She doesn’t want the Japanese version of Hermes or Chanel. She wants the real thing.”

Kazuto Taniguchi, manager of Takashimaya’s New York office, says his retail chain “was looking for a young, aggressive designer, not a big name like Bill Blass or Geoffrey Beene” when it found Pomodoro. “We were looking for a partner. We want to grow with him.”

Taniguchi points out that not long ago, Japanese firms would purchase the rights to market foreign designer’s names, but use a Japanese designer to interpret the work for the Japanese customer.

In Pomodoro’s case, the interpretive changes are minimal. For example, he’s adding color options.

“I want him (Pomodoro) to keep close to his own (American) line,” Taniguchi says of the designer’s sporty but unadorned collections. “The Japanese people have been all over the world. They know everything that’s going on. They want the real thing.”

Some American designers with successful boutiques in Japan no longer market their wares in the States. Los Angeles-based Gregory Poe, for instance, has 16 boutiques throughout Japan, but none of the clothing is sold here.

Poe has been working with the Japanese for about 10 years, ever since buyers for a Japanese store spotted some of his accessories, encasing such things as toys and plastic fish, at Macy’s in New York. According to Poe, the buyers were so enamored of his work that they bought up all of Macy’s stock (at retail prices), shipped it to Japan and brought Poe to the country as a rising star.

“I think they saw something in me they didn’t get in other designers,” he explains. “And they loved the lineage.” (Poe is a third-generation Californian and says he is related to Edgar Allen Poe.)

Though he admits he’s had to dilute his fashion statements somewhat for the conservative tastes of his Japanese customers, Poe is generally delighted with the way things have worked out.

“Every backer I dealt with in the United States was such a charlatan and hadn’t the faintest idea of how to run a business,” he says, recalling the days when his line was carried in trendy Western boutiques. “A designer really should be specifically designing and not having to tell a manufacturer how to run a business.”

In certain cases, Japanese marketing specialists have admired American retailing style-setters so much that they have encouraged them to invent clothing lines where none existed.

Consider Charivari of New York. The name has long been associated with a distinctive approach to merchandising. Each of the six stores in New York is completely different, but they all carry high-style goods from leading designers around the world.

None of the stores, however, carried its own in-house line of clothing--until the Japanese suggested the idea. Charivari owner Thelma Weiser and her family-member partners now create a line of men’s wear for Charivari shops in Japan only. The second of their stores opened there earlier this month in Tokyo.

Tom Mendenhall, the chain’s men’s wear buyer, says: “In Japan right now, there’s a high demand for American merchandise. What they liked about Charivari was the strong image. Even though other stores in the world buy some of the same collections we do, I think it’s the point of view with which we present them that made Charivari appealing to the Japanese.”

Why the Japanese penchant for American names that haven’t really caught on in the United States?

In the opinion of Anthony Paul, editor-in-chief of Business Tokyo, Japan’s leading international business magazine, part of the reason may be that these relatively unfamiliar names are desirable because of their growth potential.

“It’s very possible that these non-names will become big names. What the Japanese might be doing is making a forecast,” says Paul. “They see a potential winner and they’re tying up to it so that when it does make its mark in the United States, they’ll be well situated to take advantage of it over there. Also, price is a consideration. They can get it cheap before it’s a big-time name.

“I think what the Japanese entrepreneurs are doing is identifying products that they know will appeal to the Japanese.”

Plus, Paul notes, “they don’t have to pay the high licensing fees for well-known designers. It’s just clever marketing.”