ROCKET MAN

Little Ricky the chihuahua does not want to be petted. He makes this known with a low growl. But his owner, William Beranek, persists in holding him toward a visitor, butt first.

“Have you met Ricky?”

There comes a yelp, a flash of small teeth, a brief commotion during which the tan-and-black dog manages to escape. Beranek shrugs as if apologizing to both guest and pet. “He’s a snapper. But he’s never bitten anybody.”

Consider the episode a momentary lapse in judgment by a man who otherwise has shown a knack for doing the right thing at the right time.

The Los Angeles-based designer--better known as William B--is coming off his best year, flush with sales and acclaim, clearly one of the brightest young talents on the Southern California scene. This spring, he introduces a new line of denim called the “B” line--a practical choice in that the fashion media are predicting another season of bohemian chic, and denim is a proven seller. “I’ve done a piece here and there,” Beranek says. “The next season comes and I keep getting requests for it. The next season comes and I still get requests.”

But this business can be elusive, an intangible mix of commerce and creativity. Beranek knows it will take more than marketing strategy to make his “B” line a success, to make it “perform,” as they say in the industry. He knows more people are watching him now, waiting to see what he will do next. So when he flips through denim swatches, crinkling and sniffing and even pressing them against his forehead, he is hoping for “something that pops out, something that sparks an idea.” He chooses a traditional cotton denim from Italy. “Then,” he says, “you start playing with the fabric.” Turn it inside out. Wash it five different ways. Hope for a bit of magic.

“Something special,” he says. “Something dramatic.”

Last fall, that something was a flirtatious little skirt inspired by his wife’s collection of Fendi baguette bags. Beranek combined animal prints and ornate fabrics with colorful linings and beaded fringe, a potent blend that Women’s Wear Daily called “hippie, wild and free.” The only thing wilder were the sales.

Business was already on the upswing, with the William B line in hundreds of specialty shops and department stores such as Henri Bendel and Saks Fifth Avenue. Then Beranek sold 10,000 fringed skirts--at $130 wholesale each--in three months.

“It was a turning point,” says Mark Goldstein, who owns Madison boutique in Brentwood. “It put him out there.”

In October, CaliforniaMart named Beranek designer of the year--he’d been nominated the previous two years--and his annual sales doubled to $4 million. That’s hardly a blip on the radar screen in an industry where the Donna Karans and Calvin Kleins ring up tens and hundreds of millions a year, but it was encouraging. Maybe $10 million this year. Maybe $15 million. Beranek has seen it happen to other designers in Los Angeles.

“BCBG was a $5-million company four or five years ago,” he says. “Now it’s a $300-million company.”

Spring is the next measuring stick. Beranek’s downtown studio bustles with assistants yelling over the telephone, deliverymen squeezing in and out of elevators, the clatter echoing off bare cement floors and brick walls against an ambient grumble of street traffic from 13 floors below. It’s enough to keep Little Ricky off his bed beneath a bank of windows, where fabric swatches have been taped hastily to the glass.

But the stir has no apparent effect on 37-year-old Beranek, who looks stylishly haphazard in a tightfitting sweater and slacks. His short, dark hair is in a continual state of disarray, his voice barely rising above a whisper. “There has always been pressure,” he says.

In 1988, he decided to quit his family’s aerospace business in Torrance. “We made little fittings and latches and things. . . . God, I don’t even know what they’re called anymore,” he says. “I hated it.” He was 25 when surfing pal Henry Duarte enrolled at the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles. The closest Beranek had come to couture was prowling vintage shops on weekends, but still, designing sounded a whole lot better than latches and things.

The buddies took a few night classes, then rented a studio and started making custom menswear, colorful blazers and piece-paneled vests, which New Kids on the Block wore in a Coca-Cola commercial. Duarte was on his way to becoming a favorite designer with rock stars. But Beranek, who oversaw production and business, grew dissatisfied. After a year and a half, there was a bumpy divorce.

“He really came into the thing blind and just learned,” says Duarte, who has an eponymous boutique on Sunset Strip. “Then he wanted to do his own line.”

Even then, Beranek knew the cold, hard facts: A designer is only as good as his active accounts, only as hot as his next collection. He says, “I don’t let it bother me.”

But his wife tells a different tale. Jeannine Braden--a veteran of the fashion wars as a longtime stylist and owner of Fred Segal Flair in Santa Monica--recognizes the pressure he feels to come up with new ideas.

“He starts not being able to sleep,” Braden says. “Or waking up at 4 in the morning.”

You start playing with the fabric.

The denim has a stitched thin red line, a manufacturing detail usually hidden in the seams of a finished garment. “I start using the red line in interesting ways,” Beranek says. “I start exposing it.”

His new line features a $125 jacket with a hint of color down the front, along the buttons. And a $100 cropped pant with color at the hem. “Very subtle detail,” he says. “Because that’s basically what I’m about.”

Look at William B collections from past seasons and you’ll notice details occasionally venturing beyond subtle, into the brazen territory of pinstripe pants with sequin trim or a faux cow-print skirt with whipstitching and ruby red lining. “I like color,” Beranek says. He doesn’t stop there.

Toying with ideas for this spring’s collection, he sends his 12-ounce denim for test washings. It comes back with edges frayed, threads unraveled in an unintended fringe. That inspires a $70 poncho and a $90 pant with feathery hems, then a $125 jacket with the armholes frayed like funky military epaulets. The look reminds Beranek of all those hours he spent in vintage shops. “There’s a certain novelty about old denim,” he says. “What I’m doing now is kind of like having old, used stuff that’s actually new.”

William B began as a men’s label in 1990, but only a few years later, Beranek made a crucial decision, setting his sights on the larger and more lucrative women’s market. “It was a little fumbly at the beginning,” Braden says. “But he kept getting a better and better formula.”

The look was classically tailored with cropped sweaters, fitted suede skirts and wool crepe suits. Vogue soon mentioned Beranek in the same breath as Richard Tyler and Mark Eisen, two Southern California designers who earned national acclaim. But unlike Tyler and Eisen, Beranek lacked a crucial ingredient: “Every season,” he says, “sales in my New York showroom would get less and less.”

William B languished, too expensive for the contemporary market and not well known enough to command designer prices. By the end of 1995, Beranek was close to dropping out of business, having learned that talent wasn’t enough. A designer must identify his market niche, control costs and get orders shipped on time. “Either he has to have good business sense or he has to be smart enough to hire someone who does,” says Barbara Bundy, vice president of education at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles. “It starts when you put your line together. We’re talking about a whole production calendar.”

The self-taught Beranek saw the contemporary market as his best shot at survival. He shifted from classics to sequined tops, faux pony fur and pashmina skirts in vibrant orange. He also dropped prices by 30%, which meant cutting costs. “Rather than have a whole group in expensive fabrics, I’d have five pieces that were in nice, beautiful, affordable stuff and then one or two pieces that were over the top with a price tag.”

Sales perked up as Beranek built a following among a certain kind of woman. “She’s in her 20s or 30s and very trend-inspired,” says Stefani Greenfield, who sells William B at her Scoop boutiques in New York City. “She wants to look as if she gets what’s happening in the magazines but she’s not a slave to fashion.”

Greenfield sees two keys to Beranek’s success. First, he retains the tailored silhouettes of his early collections, giving customers the cuts they want. Second, he is married to Braden, who is one of Greenfield’s longtime friends.

If Beranek is the silent type, Braden vibrates with enough energy and emotion for both of them. “The ultimate girly girl,” Greenfield says. “If I were to describe Jeannine, it would be something leopard, something pink. She was about pink way before it was on the runways.”

True to form, Braden arrives for latte on the Westside in a hodgepodge of leopard spots, silver jewelry and burgundy fringe with a beige sweater thrown over the top. This is a woman who gets an “adrenaline rush” from fashion, who has two Flair shops at Fred Segal (a ceramic statue of a Chihuahua awaits customers at the door), not to mention a new store in the Art Luna salon and purpleskirt.com, a site she launched with Tracey Ullman and producer Stephanie Cone.

As a stylist and retailer, Braden can introduce her husband to clients and shop owners--such as Greenfield. She also can tell him what customers are asking for. “I always bounce ideas off Jeannine,” Beranek says.

Her best suggestion was the Fendi-inspired skirts. “A skirt so special it would be like a piece of jewelry,” she says. “I kept nagging him.” Beranek finally took her advice last summer, days before Market Week at the New Mart. His fall line was complete, but he hurried out to buy fabrics on a Sunday and spent Monday sewing.

“We picked seven really interesting prints and mixed it up with different colored beads and then, of course, paid really special attention to the lining,” he says. “It was this whole mishmash. Like leopard with pink and light blue.”

That first week at market, he sold 650 skirts. Something special.

Inspiration strikes unexpectedly, while Beranek is shopping or watching television or reading a magazine. Finishing off the B line, he creates a pant with a glittering belt of rhinestones around the waist. He adds rhinestones to a stretch denim skirt and an array of pima cotton tops in teal, turquoise and fuchsia.

“I was doing casting for my designer-of-the-year show and one of the girls walked in, and she’d ripped the waistband off her Levis,” he says. “What a fantastic idea.”

So he designs a pant with the waistband ripped off and frayed, and he makes a series of cotton gauze tops in zebra and leopard prints. Could there be more magic this spring?

“It’s never-ending,” he says. “Sometimes you could have an idea, and you make it up and it looks horrible. Sometimes you’ll make a piece and it comes out great. Everybody’s hungry, everybody wants new fashion, the new look.”