Betsey Johnson knows how to deliver a quote. After all, she’s been doing this for quite some time. Once the 81-year-old designer asks my name, she casually drops an anvil statement. “I just looked at my will this morning,” she says in a matter-of-fact way. “Which is really shocking.” A will? Betsey Johnson? The babe-beloved designer who perpetually lives in a Neverland kaleidoscope of frills, ruffles and freakadelic prints? The woman who still flies in from the tricked-out, floral-slathered walls of her 2,300-square-foot mobile home in Malibu to the storied Chelsea Hotel to get her flamboyant hair extensions glued in — two days, four to five hours each session! — by Andrew, the same guy she’s been going to since the mid-’90s? Her TikTok is taking off with young hot things waxing poetic about discovering saucy pieces for the very first time! Hell, Olivia Rodrigo just wore one of her vintage lace-trimmed pink slip dresses a few months ago.
Okay, don’t worry. The will is just a formality. And Johnson hasn’t even really dug into the will. “I held the envelope and saw the piece of paper,” she says. Johnson, who says “she has never looked better” and “eats so healthy, it’s a joke,” is living and loving life.
In fact, it seems as if Johnson has lived a hundred lives — and it feels like generations of us have lived them alongside her. This past fashion week at a sought-after downtown show, I sat next to 30-something-year-old writer Emilia Petrarca who told me about a newspaper print Betsey Johnson set that she wore for her interview at The Cut. “It was all women’s magazines,” she says about the print. “I liked that it wasn’t a newspaper print that was Galliano and it was specifically women’s magazines. It felt more feminine.” And the dress worked. Petrarca got the job. (She wore a Tibi dress to a Vogue internship interview. Petrarca did not get that position). Later at the same show, I ran into bonafide fashion royalty Lynn Yaeger, who got her start writing for The Village Voice back in 1978. She mused about Johnson, who lived the floor above her on Fifth Avenue back in the day. “I was a huge fan and a customer before I met her. I was excited to meet her, but it felt like I already knew her for a long time,” Yaeger says. “It captured that women can be strong and wear ruffles… she was way ahead. The same thing Batsheva and Simone [Rocha] do now.” Designer Batsheva Hay herself would take the bus in from Queens to go to Johnson’s store next to Bloomingdale’s. “It felt like the first cool thing I could get my hands on; the first fantasy thing I could get my hands on,” Hay says. “It was like Laura Ashley, but way more twisted and fun.”
