I’m a second-generation Betsey Johnson customer—my mother wore Johnson’s original Alley Cat line, and my own attachment to the designer’s stretchy floral-print miniskirts, lacy tops, and corset-waisted frocks began twenty years later. I started wearing Johnson’s designs when I was sixteen, and I still haven’t quite stopped…

I just read a New York Times article by Sheila Weller that sensitively recaps Johnson’s fifty-year career in New York. Here’s one bit:

“Her dresses were fairy-tale clothes for girls who skipped on the wild side. And as a soon-to-be regular wearer of those dresses, I would add that we wanted to walk wild for some emotional good, not tragic ill, we expected to get out of it all — for some incandescence in our souls that would match the incandescent in those dresses.”

You can read the entire article here.

Photo: Betsey Johnson in 1988, via Getty Images.