DESIGNERS : Boy Wonder Playing With Silk Money

Christian Francis Roth has survived the media blitz. Now it’s on to the challenge of staying in business.

At age 21, the elfin New Yorker looks back on a year of magazine profiles and double-page photo layouts that feature his unusual dresses and suits--emotionally childlike but technically masterful works unlike those of any other high-profile American designer.

The hype got him into stores from London to Tokyo, including Saks, Barneys, Neiman Marcus and Fred Hayman, Beverly Hills, where he showed his spring styles this week.

But he maintains that U.S. retailers carried his label even before the press got ahold of him. “When I was a nobody.”

He doesn’t seem surprised that he is now being picked apart by the very machine that made him. Recently, he was knocked in print for courting fame, though he denies the charge. He says he has been prepared for a fall from grace: “I’m not going to stay news forever.”

At Fred Hayman, Roth sits in a deep chair near the fireplace, wiggles one sockless foot inside a black suede Belgian slipper and comments that all his jeans are ripped at the knees, just like the pair he is wearing.

He thinks back to junior high school, eight or nine years ago, when he drew cartoons in class that now strike him as the first sign he would grow up to be a humorist.

Some of his earliest suits and dresses were appliqued with M&Ms;, elevator buttons and Crayolas. A newer cocktail suit has lip-shaped lapels. And in his most grown-up collection to date, for spring ‘91, a recession-era evening dress looks like a $1 bill wrapped around a body.

“My clothes are not familiar,” he says. “We’re a country of jeans and sweaters, and sportswear. But sportswear isn’t the law. I think it belongs in the back yard.”

A move in Roth’s direction will cost anywhere from $300 to $6,000 per item. Most styles are finished with hand-applied buttons and zippers and made from patterns so intricate they resemble jigsaw puzzles.

Some are made in limited editions of 10, because he and his two seamstresses can’t handle more. Sales last year totaled $750,000.

That isn’t to say he’s ignoring the high-volume competition.

“I won’t ever be major,” he says. “I’m not Isaac Mizrahi.”