Bohemian Rhapsody

Monah Li never thought she’d end up in a downtown office building. Not long ago, Li’s natural habitat was bohemian Los Feliz, where her romantic mixed-fabric dress designs made her the local hero of Vermont Avenue. The location fit her edgy image: She dates, off and on, literary bad boy Jerry Stahl (“Permanent Midnight”), whose past addiction to heroin was portrayed on screen by Ben Stiller. And she once did time in a mental hospital for her own drug problems, long since vanquished.

Now Li begins her days rushing past the woman who sells watery coffee at the entrance to the Cooper Building, a creaky stalwart of L.A.’s Garment District, where she has a new, 5,100-square-foot studio on the 11th floor. The building is filled with mainstream fashion types--and now Li is one of them.

“I never wanted to be a garmento,” she says, competing with the noise of drilling from another floor. “I didn’t want to be downtown. I didn’t want to do stuff that was fashion-fashion. I never even looked at magazines.”

A few feet from her desk, pages torn from fashion magazines litter a drafting table, more evidence that she has evolved into the fashion executive she disdained becoming. After establishing her name with hand-dyed and hand-painted creations, Li has shuttered her Los Feliz store and joined hipster clothing giant Bebe Stores Inc. as a designer, opening the first L.A. office for the San Francisco-based company.

Her trajectory from rising maverick designer to foundering business owner is a familiar story in the rag trade. In Li’s case, talent, a cult following and packed fashion shows in her own store were not enough to offset bad luck and a shaky business sense in an unforgiving industry. “Just because you’re a great designer and a great person doesn’t mean that you’ve got a good head for business,” says Laurie Pike, editor of Glue magazine, which covers L.A. fashion and culture. “Every season a great fashion designer goes under. It’s a lot tougher than having your own restaurant.”

Hobbled by debt and weary of the pressures, Li found relief from a most unlikely source--a mass-market manufacturer of trendy clothes aimed mostly at twentysomethings.

Li’s transition, which began in November, has been tricky because Bebe’s mission is a bit of a Zen riddle for her. Known for its sexy but accessible styles, Bebe wants Li to help it jump on trends as they leave the gate and quickly translate them into moderately priced clothes. At the same time, her bosses hired Li specifically for her sense of style--which eschews trendiness in favor of fluid lines, feminine embellishments and richly colored fabrics, often a mix of textures.

“Bebe’s stuff is supposed to be sexy, modern and sophisticated--and I know I have the sexy part down,” she says. The modern part is turning out to be more of a challenge. Although she gave Bebe some of the big-band-era chiffon dresses and pinstriped suits that she designed for her last Monah Li spring line, she’s had to pick her way gingerly around Bebe land. Her first attempt to channel the Bebe mind-set resulted in sparkly mini-dresses that mixed denim with silk charmeuse, lace and feathers. However, Bebe executives decided they were too flashy and declined them. “They said, ‘Go back to designing what you like to wear,’ ” she says.

“It’s a great matchup in a lot of ways,” Pike says. “I think of those [Bebe] clothes as being a little too young and slutty. But if Monah Li designs for them, I’m going to watch it. If they want to pull ahead of their competition or appeal to slightly older women, Monah Li could be very helpful.”

The most striking creation of the refreshingly blunt Li is probably herself. Even her name is her own creation. Born Monah Schmid in Vienna 42 years ago, she became Lila--as in lilac--to her friends in the late ‘70s because of her fixation with purple. She didn’t like the sound of Monah Lila, so she shortened it to Li.

She remembers wanting to be a fashion designer as early as age 7. “I loved clothes. I just believe that clothes can fix you. Whatever is wrong with you on the inside, when I wear the right thing, I feel good.”

She studied art and fashion in Vienna. Her art professors told her to go into fashion. Her fashion professors told her to go into art. “I never really fit,” she says.

After making a stir in German Vogue with a line of clothes made from painted silk, Li joined her psychiatrist mother in Los Angeles. Briefly, Li did silk painting for Trashy Lingerie. A short stint at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising followed, but by then Li was bored with school.

“I was really partying and taking drugs,” she says. “I was so messed up. I could have died here.”

Instead, she went back to Austria, where her father committed her to a mental institution for nine months of drug rehab in 1987. There, a funny thing happened. The psychiatrist running her program wanted to be a fashion designer, and he used the recovering addicts as free labor to sew his collection. He eventually was fired, but Li loved the set-up. “He had hired a really good pattern-maker and a really good seamstress, and these women took me under their wing. They taught me couture.”

She made her grand return to Los Angeles 12 years ago, becoming the hot new thing. That lasted several months, until knock-offs diminished her impact on the fashion scene, she says. Determined to turn out a line that couldn’t be copied easily, she started making clothes of intricately dyed fabrics. In October 1998, Li opened her own store--a reflection of her distinctive aesthetic and her independence. Her unabashedly romantic and funky retro designs of distressed rayon, silk and velvet appealed to celebrity trendsetters, showing up on characters in “Friends” and on Nicole Kidman in the movie “Practical Magic.”

Once again, Li battled imitators. She accused designer Patty Shelabarger of ripping Li’s labels out of thousands of dollars’ worth of garments and sewing in her own for sale in Italy. A legal settlement bars either side from discussing the matter.

Li still faces the world in custom Monah Li. Today she’s wearing a flowing patchwork skirt of silk satin and chiffon trimmed with vintage lace. Her fitted black leather jacket has a Victorian flavor. At her waist is a big black leather don’t-mess-with-me belt with multiple buckles and grommets.

“I like to wear something real feminine with something real not feminine,” she says.

All of it preferably tiny. Li’s size 0 frame means she’s too small to buy off-the-rack Monah Li. It wasn’t always thus. When she began the line, pieces started at her size and were graded up from there. “I got so many complaints, I lost a lot of customers. Size large would have been size 6, so it wasn’t good.”

Besides, it didn’t fit her philosophy of embracing a variety of body types. “If you’ve ever been to any of my shows, I always have one or two really big girls, maybe 200 pounds. I wanted to show that you don’t have to be skinny to look good,” she says.

“One reason I hated working in the store was that all these skinny Hollywood women would walk in and whine about their bodies: ‘I hate my arms. Don’t you think my thighs are too fat?’ I have a daughter [Lilly, 9],” says the divorced Li, “and I never wanted her to be around that. Before I had the store, people came to my loft and I told a few women, ‘You have to leave.’ ”

Li found it difficult and isolating running her own business, so she teamed up with designer Alicia Lawhon to launch the Coalition of Los Angeles Designers in 1998. Ultimately, peer support wasn’t enough to buoy her spirits and steady her company. A production contractor, hired last year, did such shoddy work that stores nationwide returned the merchandise, she says. “We lost $500,000 one month, then $300,000 the next month, and it just started to get really hard and nasty.”

She considered bailing out. “I realized I would have to declare chapter whatever that is, and I just started thinking I would like to work for somebody else, where I can just design and not have to deal with production.”

But she cobbled together a spring collection for the New York fashion shows last September. It turned out to be a wise move. Bebe reps were wowed by her designs. Less than two months later, she was on the payroll.

“She has a unique talent,” says Bebe CEO and founder Manny Mashouf. “Her dresses are highly designed in terms of seams and details. They’re sexy and feminine and have a fluid motion.”

And Li hopes all the girls will be wearing them later this year, when her sensibility is suffused into the Bebe line. Says Li of her new life. “I just feel a lot more awake now than I did last year.”