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Here they sit in white plastic lawn chairs sipping Evian--women in their 40s, 50s and 60s, immaculately coiffed, manicured and exuding class. From across Los Angeles and Orange counties, even Las Vegas, they have gathered in a Los Angeles backyard that needs new grass, with trees that could use a clip job.

But none of that matters. Their attention is riveted on models their age who emerge from the kitchen, strolling across the yard onto an elevated runway.

The guests applaud, point and talk to one another about their favorite looks in James Reva’s new fall collection that the L.A. designer says is for “the forgotten woman.” She is an older, mature, fit woman--still active, still sensuous and craving stylish clothes. But she doesn’t want to dress like a teenager or look like the ubiquitous Twiglet models in shredded sheaths and dirt-rubbed jeans splashed in magazines.

Reva’s clients--ladies who lunch, lawyers, estate planners, schoolteachers, volunteer moms who fund-raise and businesswomen--say they just want to look their age in classic, modern styles without looking matronly--a frustrating pursuit amid the midriff-baring, low-rise trends that flood a youth-obsessed clothing market.

“No matter where our waistlines have gone--and believe me, they have shifted--James knows how to design for a woman that doesn’t have the Britney Spears body,” says 20-year Reva client Terre Thomas, daughter of Danny Thomas and a fund-raiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. “Besides, we don’t want to chase that trend. We want to look our age, but we also want to look hip and good and with it.”

“What older woman wants to go into a store that is a hip-hop shop?” asks Marshal Cohen, co-president of the Port Washington, N.Y.-based market researcher NPDFashionworld. “This is a very ignored market” he says of the nearly 40 million women 35 and older who spend $45 billion annually on apparel. That accounts for 51% of all women’s apparel sales in the U.S. last year compared with 14% spent by the junior market. Yet, he says, older women these days often “feel like their figures are not what designers and retailers care about” and they are the ones with the real spending power. “Where do they go?”

In L.A., on a recent Tuesday morning, it was to Reva’s Fairfax Avenue studio, a two-story home the designer converted into a showroom and factory 10 years ago. Here the women prefer the intimate, private setting--despite the occasional barking dog and roaring motorcycles--that Reva’s biannual backyard fashion shows provide, a concept so retro (think Avon) that it’s forward.

Reva takes it all in, pingponging from one customer to another, answering questions about fabric and cut, mixing and matching, accessorizing and the oft-repeated query: “How do I look in this, James?”

“You know,” the 62-year-old designer says, “you can tear apart a T-shirt and sew it inside out and upside down, but that doesn’t give you a career. Listen to what women want. That’s the key.”

He caters to his clients because he knows “they are money in the bank.” Indeed, Reva’s personal touch, his endurance and evolution in the cutthroat world of fashion, has served him well. While contemporaries such as David Hayes has participated in L.A.’s fashion week with a star-studded front row and Peter Cohen just opened a new shop within the last year, Reva takes a different route.

Twelve years ago he took the specialty-store concept of trunk shows--small, exclusive showings where orders are taken on the spot--into private homes where women can select garments in the $200-to-$650 price range from current collections and shoes, handbags and jewelry from local designers. He also began his backyard fashion events.

Today, Reva has a network of 10 commission-earning full-time fashion directors and another 10 part-timers who bring clients to his studio. The directors also coordinate weeklong one-on-one fittings between customers and the designer whose Wardrobe Dressing Inc. nearly hit $1 million in sales last year.

Making Them Look Good

“If anything, a woman wearing a James Reva garment will be remembered--not forgotten,” says longtime client Rita Amendola, who owns a Santa Monica company that plans estate sales. For three decades she and other clients have counted on him to make them look good by hiding and highlighting their changing bodies.

“I have big hips and small shoulders but I can still wear size 8 and can squeeze into a 6 because James knows how to conceal and bring out the best in me. That’s why we love him,” Amendola says while taking in the show of comfortable ribbed knits, sexy ruffled tops and fluted evening skirts floating down the catwalk.

Gael Libby, a volunteer coordinator for a domestic violence shelter in Orange County, always jokes that there are two men in her life: “My husband and James Reva. They both make me feel and look fabulous.” A 15-year Reva devotee, she admits, “I’m hippier now. And I’m tall. But James always reminds me that I have a small waist. So, for me, the cut is on the bias--fitted on the top and flared out. I always feel I’m going to look age appropriate, elegant and feminine in his clothes.”

Most of Reva’s customers--affectionately known as “Reva’s harem”--have followed the designer since 1972 when he opened his first boutique in Arcadia, followed by another in Pasadena, attracting college coeds with his hip-hugger designs and other creations. Soon came a Newport Beach boutique on Balboa Island and then his signature, star-magnet shop in Beverly Hills, where he created clothes for 12 years for actresses such as Rita Hayworth, Barbra Streisand, Cher, Raquel Welch, Diana Ross, Ali MacGraw and Jane Fonda, including the evening gown Fonda wore when she won . the 1978 Oscar for best actress.

By then Reva had closed his earlier free-standing boutiques and in the early 1980s shut down the Beverly Hills shop to produce his clothes for the next several years for Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor and Bergdorf Goodman as well as the long gone Bullocks Wilshire and I. Magnin.

In 1986, he realized that “wholesaling was eating me alive” and began his backyard and home events.

‘Women, Not Girls’

“I’m honest with my customers,” Reva says several days later at his studio, where he works with a full-time staff of five. “I have no qualms about telling a woman, ‘This will not look good on you.’ Women want to hear that. Not everyone is a size 0 or wants to be.” And, he says there are a lot of petite women--young and old--who don’t want to wear hip huggers, don’t want their midriffs exposed. “They want to dress like women, not girls.”

And having dressed actresses, he has seen how Hollywood is hard on them as they age, shoving them aside for younger women regardless of their talent. “That was one of the reasons I got out of Hollywood. I wanted to see another side of this business. I didn’t just want to deal with some insanely egotistical person who is so insecure and then have to deal with her business manager, her publicist, her handlers, her handlers’ handlers and her mother on top of it.”

These days Reva relishes working with women who have become more than clients. They’re his friends who accompany him to movies, the theater, opera, museums and art galleries.

“He’s Mr. L.A.,” says Thomas about Reva’s love for the L.A. lifestyle. When Jimmy, his son, died six years ago at 33 from complications of AIDS, his customers were there for him. The divorced Reva has an adult daughter, Jennifer, and a granddaughter. Jimmy was an artist--and a jewelry designer--who once hand-painted designs on silk and cotton that Reva turned into garments. He points to his son’s work that fills the studio: colorful paintings, thoughtful messages on signs, chandeliers crafted from beads and trinkets--and more art in an upstairs bedroom where Reva crashes on late nights when he doesn’t want to drive to his Manhattan Beach home.

Karin Lekas, a Reva sales representative in Irvine for 16 years remembers “the horrible loss and pain” Reva experienced. “Watching James go through that taught us all a lesson in strength.”

Close friend and business consultant Mark E. Jarrett recalls how Reva refused to miss a day of work after his son’s death. “Part of my deep, deep respect and love for this man is because of his work ethic.”

“That’s how Jimmy would have wanted it,” Reva says. And he’s happy and proud that he, too, inspired Jimmy with his own creativity and consistent work. “Jimmy really picked up on a lot of that--about producing.”

He often has to steer clients away from looks they like but shouldn’t wear. Besides, he says, “I won’t sell anything to people when they’re not 100% sure about it because I don’t want to get it back.”

‘A Very Good Salesman’

Good salesmanship is something Reva learned from his father, Julius, who died at 45 from a brain hemorrhage. He owned and operated Reva Construction in the 1950s and built homes in the San Gabriel Valley at a time when moving to the suburbs was the thing to do.

“I’m a very good salesman,” says Reva, a Monrovia High School graduate who at 18 was a licensed real estate agent and a full-time student. “I would sit out there on a weekend and sell five or six houses for $13,500, just by myself. I would promote it, advertise it, get the signs made the way I wanted. Basically, I listened to what the people wanted.”

During the week he attended Woodbury College, where he studied advertising and fashion and graduated a year after his father’s death. Reva helped his mother, Nellie, now in her late 80s, operate the construction business until all the homes were sold. For the next year he worked in L.A.’s downtown fashion district for Vera, a scarf company. During his lunch hour and after work he’d check out other showrooms, talk to people and imagine himself in the business.

“One day I went shopping,” he says and with his real estate savings and money his dad left him. “I bought a little store in Arcadia,” which his mom helped him operate. “I just knew it, knew it, knew it--that I would get into the fashion business.”

And here he is, three decades later, still at it, pushing forward with a Web site (www.jamesreva-online.com) and thinking about the future that includes a possible return to manufacturing, which he says he’ll also reinvent because “what I really have is this tremendous history of clothing at every level.” And he understands women. “I think that’s why I’ve survived.”