Beauty Archivist: The “Sexy, Happy Girls Next Door” of Betsey Johnson’s Spring Summer 2001 Show

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In 2001 Betsey Johnson was sitting atop the empire she built from a single rail of handmade clothes in Paraphernalia, the super cool Upper East Side boutique where Edie Sedgwick went on a shopping spree in Andy Warhol’s Ciao Manhattan. Johnson was a fixture in a sixties and seventies New York scene that included Warhol and his factory stars, every celebrity you’ve seen in pictures of Studio 54, and the Velvet Underground, one of whom she briefly married in 1968. Now, after four decades in the fashion industry, Johnson had a day-glo pink store in every counter cultural spot in America and a Betsey Johnson dress was a highly coveted gateway into rebellious adulthood for teenagers across the US. 

Despite roots in a scene that epitomised New York cool, Johnson has always been for real girls. There is none of the icy pretension that excludes a regular fan from feeling like an insider. Her clothes are not sophisticated, they are joyful and, sort of, accessible with a DIY spirit and her shows follow suit. A Betsey Johnson NYFW show always had a theme, brought to life with full staging and set design. They rejected the seriousness that so often accompanies fashion and Johnson herself would often take a turn doing cartwheels or the splits on the runway. Memorable shows include SS94’s retro beauty parlour complete with models chit chatting beneath hooded dryers, SS08’s high school prom where suited male model’s escorted stiff tutu’d prom queens down the runway, and SS14 where drag queen Sharon Needles closed the show as the bride.

The beauty at Betsey Johnson shows has always been an integral part of her world building. Different each time but never straying from her core aesthetic of sweetness and girlishness suffused with a defiant counter culture sensibility. There is a messiness and unruliness to a Betsey Johnson beauty look but all played with a sense of fun and extravagance. It's the scene queen at a party who, despite being the coolest person there, still feels like they would be the nicest too.

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“A Betsey Johnson NYFW show always had a theme, brought to life with full staging and set design. They rejected the seriousness that so often accompanies fashion and Johnson herself would often take a turn doing cartwheels or the splits on the runway.”

So, New York Fashion Week Spring Summer 2001: it’s the peak of Johnson’s heyday and this season she is mixing supermodels in favour of a cast of twenty nine Playboy models. Beaming down the runway in a collection filled with her trademark patterns, rhinestones and gauzy mini dresses in tangerine, peach, bubblegum pink and aqua blue. Bunny ears top several looks as well as bows, ribbons, silk flower corsages and the odd tiara and wand. It's a collection that would have fitted right into Carrie Bradshaw's wardrobe, as well as it does on fans of Betsey’s Y2K revival like Olivia Rodrigo today. The collection is totally hyper flirty and girly and it's the casting and beauty that provide the frisson.

“I wanted a people approach rather than model mannequins, who walk the same way and do the same thing,” Johnson said about her September “Pinup Calendar” theme show. “I wanted the sexy, happy girl-next-door. I wanted to celebrate women, loving their bodies as they love to share them.”

The hair is crispy barrel curled and piled extra extra high in artificial shades of Barbie blonde or warm flat chestnut, bearing no relation to the complexion of the wearer, undertones obliterated by a deep St Tropez glow. There’s a tousled, leaning towards bedraggled, vibe that calls to mind Pamela Anderson’s technique of fixing her messy updo with a thong. There is a thrown together end of the night energy that adds a little of Johnson’s rebellious party girl spirit to the more apple pie look normally worn in the pages of Playboy. It’s hair that did have hours spent on it, but is now being photographed climbing into the back of a taxi after the kind of party that doesn’t really exist anymore. 

The smokey black eyeshadow starts in a place that would be recognisable to Paris Hilton and then extends way beyond that to almost Adam Ant proportions. A blunt charcoal swipe that reaches towards the ears. Lipstick and blusher is candy pink. A classic sexy look made subversive by its intensity and lack of precision. It makes me think of Julia Fox’s much memed eye makeup in the way it takes a canonically male gaze serving aesthetic and pushes it to such an extreme that it is purposely off putting for its original audience, and in doing so makes it fun and hedonistic in a female rather than feminine way. 

It’s somewhat ironic that in 2001 a more diverse body type meant looking to a magazine famous for models of different but equally improbable proportions, but the vibe does still stand and the images of the smiling and sometimes awkward walk of the Playmate models does feel closer to a real life woman that the superhuman poise and sleekness of a runway professional. It is relevant to consider Playboy's cultural position in the beginning of the 2000s and why Johnson’s casting would have felt more punk than regressive. This was a few years before The Girls Next Door aired and images of Paris and Lindsay in Playboy branded tank tops were everywhere. Even then, during its MTV era, Playboy was considered sort of ironic, slightly cringey and definitely decades in decline from its position as a chic mens lifestyle brand. Fashion had not notably engaged with Playboy since 1992 when Anna Nicole Smith became the face of Guess. Since then Smith was mostly profiled only in tabloids for her weight fluctuations and the Playboy image felt out of date both for its hyper-sexuality and the relative tameness of that sexuality in comparison to the increasingly wide availability of online porn. In this climate Betsey Johnson’s casting was unusual at the time, a championing of low culture that probably really riled up the traditional fashion press. 

Looking back from 2023 there are, of course, critiques that can be validly made against Betsey Johnson’s assertion that Playboy Bunnies represent real women and their bodies more than the average runway selection, but through the Betsey Johnson lens I find it hard to get annoyed with the decision. This show to me encapsulates her iconoclastic and joyful point of view, partly because it refuses to take its own commentary too seriously. It’s performing silly sexiness to and for women only. The beauty is perfect and the looks, if you can find them on Vinted, would still hit perfectly today.

Words: Grace Maria Ellington