Most fashion designers appear in the final moments of their shows, give a demure bow to the audience and sidle off. Betsey Johnson, however, does cartwheels down the catwalk. Even if you know absolutely nothing about her design philosophy, that alone provides a strong clue that she isn't of the black, minimalist school of clothing.
Exuberant, irrepressible, dazzling - the adjectives apply as much to her dresses, which are available in Lane Crawford, as to her personality.
After 20 years running her own business, she is still a powerhouse of wild energy. Even better, she's discovering success and fame with her modern vintage look in - whisper it - her more focused middle age.
Johnson will be 56 in August. For this interview in her sunny New York studio, she is wearing her red hair in a high cascade on top of her head, a purple slip dress cut low enough to show off a well-preserved bosom across which a green lightning flash has been tattooed (in Hong Kong, as it happens, many years ago), and her long fingernails are bright emerald.
She is undeniably eccentric but nobody survives more than three decades in the unforgiving rag trade without at least a morsel of commonsense. One fashion writer has labelled her 'the hippie who never grew up' but asked to comment on this description, Johnson remarks dryly: 'I was never a hippy. Hippies took a lot of drugs and never worked, right?' And she has certainly worked. In 1964, she won Mademoiselle magazine's Guest Editor contest (a previous winner, in 1953, was the angst-ridden poet Sylvia Plath which just goes to show how all-embracing of personality type that competition could be). A year later, Johnson was a designer and had become thoroughly immersed in the New York zeitgeist. She married John Cale of The Velvet Underground and Edie Sedgwick, that poor little rich girl who became a symbol of drug-wasted beautiful youth, was her fitting model.
In the 1970s, as well as creating for the label Alley Cat, she was trotting backwards and forwards to Hong Kong, designing a junior line called Star Ferry ('very groovy') and getting tattooed ('in a funky arcade up from The Peninsula'). She divorced Cale and married again.
In 1975, her daughter Lulu was born and in 1978, so was Betsey Johnson the label, which she still owns equally with her business partner, Chantal Bacon. Lulu grew up to be a sleek girl who likes Prada (she used to cry when her mother appeared in public in her trademark sartorial efforts), and is now in charge of the company's higher-priced, more conservative Ultra line which was launched in 1996.