A singer in L.A.M.B.’s clothing, no doubt

Pick a celebrity, any celebrity -- Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, Beyonce Knowles, Justin Timberlake -- they all have clothing lines. But Gwen Stefani has something they don’t: a wicked sense of personal style.

Stefani is the celebrity headliner at this season’s New York Fashion Week, which she closes out on Friday with the first runway show of her L.A.M.B. clothing label.

She greets a guest on Sunday, five days before the big event, and the collection is far from finished. Stefani is blowing into her SoHo design studio after a music rehearsal for the show, and even here among the see-and-be-seen crowd on Broadway, there is no question that she is the star.

In sweatpants with L.A.M.B. printed on the cuffs, a zip-up hoodie with Rastafarian stripes, mile-high Christian Louboutin leopard-print stilettos and borrowed bling in the form of a gold Cartier necklace with a tassel on the end, she looks fabulous. Her platinum blond hair is swept into a tidy bun, while her lips and long nails are the perfect shade of crimson.

Upstairs, co-designer Zaldy and stylist Andrea Leiberman buzz around clothing racks full of floral dresses with wisteria prints (“They grow like weeds on the side of the highway in Japan,” Stefani offers), skinny jeans and screen-printed cardigans. Slip-on sneakers and other accessories have hard-core details such as padlocks, keys and chains.

Back in Stefani’s office, a work table is covered with spools and swatches. A stack of sketches is paper-clipped with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, Stefani’s idol. Nearby, a mannequin is wearing the start of a white gown. Fluffing the hem on the creamy silk column, Stefani explains: “This is the bride. I had the concept for the dress, but the back was wrong. Then, I was lying in bed the other night and I had an epiphany. It needed a dropped waist.”

Seemingly out of nowhere, a video camera is thrust in her face. “This is my brother, Todd,” says Stefani, 35, adding that the two are planning a DVD documentary about the design process. “I wouldn’t have anybody else in my life with me all the time,” she says. No reality shows here.

Stefani’s first foray into the fashion business was in 2003, when she was approached to design a collection of handbags for LeSportsac. She chose “L.A.M.B.” spelled out in Gothic letters as a logo (named after her childhood dog) and the corresponding words “Love, Angel, Music, Baby” as a recurring motif.

The name stuck and she launched a full L.A.M.B. clothing line for spring 2004, based on the touchstones of her personal style, incorporating elements of Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music,” heavily made-up tough girls she got to know growing up in Orange County and Jamaican Rastafarians. The 2006 spring collection brings pirates and Victoriana into the mix, which she researched by renting the “Pirates of the Caribbean” film costumes from a London costume house.

“This collection is very wearable,” says Stefani, who is married to Gavin Rossdale, former front man of the band Bush whose new group is called the Institute, and splits her time among New York, L.A. and London. “Nothing is clingy. There are lots of fancy dresses that you can wear during the day with flip flops or you can dress up at night.”

Stefani’s show will, naturally, incorporate some of her new music, including the yet-to-be released song “Orange County Girl.” “I didn’t know if I could use my new music, if the record company would want that. But it’s mixed in with other stuff. So it’s just a little lick.” Sony is bankrolling the $1-million production.

Stefani is realistic about the glut of celebrity fashion labels and her primary role as a muse for co-designer Zaldy, who also has his own fashion line. “I would not be where I’m at if I wasn’t a celebrity. I would not have someone paying for this line,” she admits, which, according to Women’s Wear Daily, is selling in more than 200 stores, including Henri Bendel, Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom, with strong fall and spring numbers. L.A.M.B. retail sales for 2005 are expected to reach $40 million, according to a spokeswoman for the line.

Still, she has a way to go before reaching the success of some of her celebrity competitors. Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Sean John line, which launched in 1998, pulls in annual sales in the $400-million range and won a Council of Fashion Designers of America award last year. Jennifer Lopez’s Sweetface label, which closed out Fashion Week with its first show in February, is taking in an estimated $200 million in annual sales, according to the Wall Street Journal.

For Stefani, though, it’s just as much about the love of designing. “I have been making clothes all my life,” she adds. I don’t know how many fittings I’ve been in since I was 3 years old,” she says. Indeed, Stefani did sew many of her early costumes when No Doubt was performing in clubs instead of arenas.

The line has made fans out of pals Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz, but Stefani insists she designs L.A.M.B. for herself. “In fact, I get jealous when other people wear it if I haven’t worn it yet,” she says. “For this collection, there are going to be very strict instructions. There is so much stuff I want to wear that they can’t be sending it out to other celebrities.”

L.A.M.B. pieces are priced from about $100 to $600. It is produced in China, where Stefani says the factory workers have her photo hung on the wall above their machines for inspiration.

This month, Stefani is also launching Harajuku Lovers, a more affordable line of novelty merchandise pegged to her current solo album and cutesy Japanese backup singers named Love, Angel, Music and Baby. It is available now at Kitson on Robertson Boulevard, and it will be in Urban Outfitters in November, featuring products relating to song lyrics such as banana-shaped erasers (which references the hit “Hollaback Girl”) lip gloss and bubble gum, and T-shirts and sweatshirts for men, women and kids.

With prices at less than $100, Harajuku Lovers is for the fans, she says. “I didn’t see myself doing regular merchandise, like a T-shirt with a Gwen face on it. That’s embarrassing.”

Jerry Leigh, chief executive of Jerry Leigh Entertainment, the California-based licensor collaborating with Stefani on Harajuku Lovers, has said the line could do as much as $2 million in sales its first season.

Stefani is obsessed with all things Japanese, and her product lines and websites (both gwenstefani.com and harajukulovers.com) trade on the same childlike fairy tales as Sanrio’s Hello Kitty. Many clothing items have hidden messages written in the linings -- a poem or motivational phrase such as “You’ve got some wicked style.” Ironically, she has yet to conquer the Japanese market. “I’ve always wanted to be big in Japan,” she says. “But they listen to Japanese music, which is fair enough.”

Long before Fox’s “The O.C.” made Orange County fashionable, Stefani’s sense of style was being molded in Anaheim, where she grew up in the shadow of Disneyland. She remembers shopping at Jo-Ann fabric stores with her mom, Patti. “My brothers would be running around the fabric rolls and I would be sitting there with my Simplicity and Vogue pattern books.

“Old Hollywood was always an inspiration, with the blond hair and the red lips,” she says. “I was also inspired by chola girls in their baggy pants and wife beaters. It was always about a contrast between being overly girlie, with long red nails and masses of makeup, and being masculine and tougher. And if you look at the collection, you will always see that.”

Stefani was one of four kids, and it was older brother Eric Stefani who started the band No Doubt and persuaded his sister to sing. “I didn’t really need a passion because he was the passion. I was his puppet,” she says. “He brought home a ska record and we got super into Madness and the Specials. We thought we had discovered something really underground. And it was underground in Orange County.”

Ska music drove her look in high school, where she says she was far from the coolest kid. “I was really into thrift store shopping,” she says. “We would get clothes from the 1950s and ‘60s and taper the pants. Everything was pegged.”

Her first fashion show was for Nordstrom’s Brass Plum junior’s label at the Buena Park mall. Her first designer purchase was the Vivienne Westwood corset she wore in the early “Spiderwebs” video. “I was on Melrose and I saw this corset in the window and I was obsessed. It was $800, which was a million dollars to me. They didn’t have that in the budget for the video, but I didn’t care.” She still wears it, and says Westwood is the one designer “I give all my money to.”

John Galliano is another favorite and a frequent collaborator. Their relationship began after Stefani watched a video of one of his fashion shows. “I couldn’t believe it was so amazing. Cut to my wedding dress,” she says, referring to the dip-dyed pink confection she wore when she married in 2002. “He said he was going to make a gown based on everything I love. It was very punk rock, which you couldn’t really tell from the pictures. But it had zippers and cargo pockets.”

She has yet to consult the Christian Dior designer about her own fashion line. “I would never go there with him. I would be ashamed to consider myself treading anywhere in his land. He’s so shockingly clever.” But she did have him over for dinner at her Los Feliz home a couple of years ago. “I rolled out the red carpet and had a long table with red roses. It was like a wedding. It was crazy. We drank champagne and I cried all night because it was so cool.”

Galliano told her about the corseted gowns he was working on for his collection, and she ended up wearing one of the regal-looking creations in her “What You Waiting For?” video. “The crate the dress came in couldn’t fit in the front door of the Beverly Hills Hotel where we were shooting,” she remembers. “The dress itself weighed 50 pounds.”

Next month, she hits the road for the Harajuku Lovers tour, which stops at the Hollywood Bowl on Oct. 21. But for now -- or at least until Friday -- it’s all about fashion. “It’s a dream come true, and I’m in it for the long run. I’m not in a rush, I don’t want this to be a hit right away. Let it be what it’s going to be. I want to do this forever.”