Connecticut born fashion designer, Betsey Johnson, is best known for her capricious couture and for doing cartwheels during the finales of her shows. She creates alluring feminine clothes and is considered to be one of the best-known designers in the world today. As a child, she was creative and showed a great aptitude for dance. As she grew older, she developed a love for costumes. Taking this interest further, she completed her higher studies at the Pratt Institute which focuses on art and design. In college, she joined the Alpha Xi Delta sorority at Syracuse University.
She was married to John Cale, a member of Velvet Underground, but the couple were soon divorced. She has a daughter, Lulu, who now works with her. Betsey Johnson lives in New York and is a hugely successful female entrepreneur. In 2003, she took a small, old villa in Mexico and converted it into a hotel called "Betseyville" which can house about a dozen people. Even back in the 1970s, she showed her entrepreneurial streak when she scraped together some savings to start her own fashion label. She modelled and earned some money from an aspirin advert, which she added to her seed fund to start the Betsey Johnson label with partner, Chantal Bacon.
Today, the fashion house that began with a starting capital of a few hundred dollars generates a turnover of over $50 million per year with over 40 boutiques and retail outlets in the US alone. Betsey Johnson’s tryst with fashion began when she won the Mademoiselle Guest Editor Contest and went on to become a designer for the Manhattan boutique Paraphernalia.
Unlike most of her contemporaries, Betsey Johnson resisted the urge to sell out to huge multinationals and become yet another anonymous designer working for a worldwide conglomerate in the spate of mergers and acquisitions during the nineties and the earlier part of this century.
Johnson has been included in the Fashion Walk of Fame and her designs reflect her personality – over the top, exuberant, colourful, and certainly not for the demure or the faint-hearted. Her designs are known to be sexy, with fine detailing and bold colours like fuchsia pink and silver. Her embroidered and lacy dresses are particularly popular. She also has a line of accessories that includes hats, scarves and handbags.
Many famous celebrities endorse her designs, for example Salma Hayek, pop star Cyndi Lauper and Courtney Love.
