Fifty years ago, the designer Betsey Johnson — part rebel, part cheerleader — got herself from proper Connecticut to New York City, as many a respectable female adventurer was wont to do. She arrived in Manhattan by way of a 1964 Mademoiselle magazine guest editorship. (She was in good company: Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath preceded her.) But that wasn’t the New York she was searching for. She had been staying at the white-gloved Barbizon Hotel for Women, and knew there was another New York. Soon she found it: the dark new bohemia that was just then supplanting the earnest folk-singing scene of Macdougal Street. She was home.  This world, dripping with dissoluteness and a belief in the redemptive value of danger, coincided with the debut of a revolutionary new clothing consortium called Paraphernalia. Ms. Johnson, hiding her normalcy under a stark Vidal Sassoon haircut and layers of fake eyelashes, became its star designer. 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.  It’s hard to describe just how Ms. Johnson’s clothes defined us, but let me try. For one, they amped up the youthquake gimmick of the time, but they also shifted gears and went romantic, with voluminous sleeves and ribboned, shirred necklines — apt, since coming to New York alone and female was all about romance. They toggled from skimpy silver minis (perfect for discothèques like the Electric Circus and the Scene) to ankle-length skirts that acknowledged the new counterculture’s fondness for medieval gowns. Edie Sedgwick was a fitting model; Julie Christie, an avid customer.  A trip to London “flipped my whole thing,” remembers Ms. Johnson, now 72, as we talk in her West 30s showroom. Racks of clothes are everywhere; dozens of tutus suspended on ceiling hooks; her eyes bright beneath her egg-yolk-yellow-striped mop of glossy vanilla hair. She was dazzled by the “sexy and edgy and romantic” Biba boutique, run by the Polish designer Barbara Hulanicki. She waited in line the two hours it often took to get into Biba each day and marveled at “the Edwardian high hats and glamorous, feminine ‘Elvira Madigan’ gowns and the Art Nouveau prints and the tight Lurex turtlenecks.”  At Paraphernalia, Ms. Johnson’s first hit was a set of three nylon microskirts: Day-Glo pink, green and yellow, crunched up in a tennis-ball can. Then came her silver motorcycle jacket. In the mid-to-late 1960s, her clothes punched your membership ticket in a chick elite: not for us, the coming-to-New York of that older generation, with “straight” jobs, roommates in high-rises and a thirst for engagement rings.  The clothes signaled a sea change. “When I wore my Betsey micro-mini crossing 39th Street at First Avenue, the truck drivers coming out of the Midtown Tunnel would go crazy,” the actress Ali MacGraw recalled. “We were so different from the depressing society ladies with their Diana Vreeland s-curved posture in their Courrègeses.” The folk-singing queen Judy Collins said: “I still have Betsey’s crushed velvet jacket, in black and bright fuchsia. In fact, I’m wearing the black one at the moment.”  Viva Hoffman, a writer and painter in Palm Springs, Calif., who was then Andy Warhol’s superstar, said: “My entire wardrobe was Betsey. Her black velvet robe with its plunging neck? I lived in it.” Her low-backed turquoise knit? She says she kissed Rudolf Nureyev in a phone booth in it.  And when the actress Anjelica Huston moved from London to New York, she was given a black Johnson jumpsuit by her best friend, the writer Joan Juliet Buck, “and I don’t think I ever took that thing off.” To Ms. Huston, Ms. Johnson personified “that wonderful, magical, Peter Pan moment before girls become adults,” a period that was both elongated and darkened during that era.  Ms. Johnson designed dresses for the girl who had fled Mayberry for the edgiest quarter of Manhattan to erase her former self. (“I didn’t want anyone to know I didn’t do drugs,” she said.)  I fled to New York a few years after Ms. Johnson did. One day after the semester was out at the University of California, Berkeley, I sat, all alone, in a plane filled with soldiers en route to Vietnam, singularly compelled to take a reverse migration I barely understood myself. Once I touched down, I picked as a long-term boyfriend an older man who had swapped girlfriends with Norman Mailer and Timothy Leary. (He also took my money and bedded other women, but that seemed at the time like a part of the process of becoming darkly, resplendently world-weary.)  I got a job as a fashion assistant at a new glossy that Hearst was starting for the counterculture. It was called Eye, and it was a magical place, all the more so as few people remember it. Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese and Nora Ephron wrote for us. The art department girls were cocky and beatific, as if cutting and pasting bits of swirling psychedelic typeface was a completely uninteresting part of their personal cosmic order.  A regular photographer was Linda Eastman: leggy, busty, impatient. Midpoint between being the receptionist at Town & Country magazine and wedding Paul McCartney, she was dating some of the rock stars she photographed, and they sometimes swaggered into the office, tie-dyed scarves looped around their messy-long-hair-dusted necks. The Eye offices were also next door to the loft where Ms. Johnson then lived with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale. I visited and interviewed her there; we featured her clothes in our layouts almost every month.  I bought almost all my own clothes at Paraphernalia’s boutique on Greenwich Avenue. An elegant Englishwoman who managed it would watch me blasé-ly holding the hangered new Betseys against my body in the three-way mirror with a worried gaze: She could see through my game face into the fast-beating heart of a girl far less confident than she wanted to appear, a girl who feared she would never be as cool as these dresses, no matter how many she bought.  Ms. Johnson tells me it was love of ballet that first brought her, the daughter of an iron foundry owner and a homemaker in “sweet, WASP, white-picket-fence” Wethersfield, Conn., to the big city. Her childhood ballet teacher ferried her to the city on weekends for recitals, but when ballet became too competitive, she, who could sew almost as soon as she could walk, threw herself into dance-costume making.  After graduating from Syracuse, she won the highly competitive guest editorship at Mademoiselle. Edie Locke (whom Ms. Johnson has for decades called “my fashion mommy”) was the magazine’s fashion editor; she saw where Ms. Johnson was headed: “She was not a ‘nice Connecticut girl’! She was born to be a hippie: bubbly, crazy and irrepressible.”  To supplement her $62-a-week Mademoiselle paycheck, Ms. Johnson started designing a Biba-inspired “great, tight, little silver lamé T-shirt,” Ms. Locke recalls. So many assistants clamored to buy them, the magazine offered them in its shopping column. Ms. Johnson found herself making three or four T-shirts every night and 10 on the weekend. Soon, the fashion businessman Paul Young told Ms. Locke about a Biba-like store he was opening on Madison. He wanted the best young designers. “We had to lose Betsey,” Ms. Locke says. “If we kept her, we’d be holding her back.”  Ms. Johnson spent her days at Paraphernalia and her nights at Max’s Kansas City, the nucleus as she puts it, of “this sparkler of a world.” (Young women quit publishing and advertising jobs in droves to be Max’s waitresses.) “It was this capsule — this tent — of impassioned, driven, crazy-great but crazy-with-an-idea people,” she said. “We all congregated there.”  Jerry Schatzberg came with his girlfriend, Faye Dunaway, then unknown. John Ford, a handsome fashion designer, came in daily with his two Irish wolfhounds. Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, brought Janis Joplin. Andy Warhol held court in the back room. Twiggy, Veruschka and Lauren Hutton were there alongside Paul Morrissey and Robert Rauschenberg and Brigitte Bardot. John Lennon and Yoko Ono slumped in a booth for privacy. The bar was the province of the brawling sculptor John Chamberlain; there were lots of amphetamine-fueled Social Register exiles vamping about, and the rumpled junkie every girl wanted to save was that bard of exquisite two-minute love songs, Tim Hardin.  Even in the workaday world, melodrama reigned. One weekend, our Eye art director, an ethereal beauty, and her photographer beau, got into their boat in a storm after taking too much LSD — and drowned. (The magazine never entirely recovered and eventually folded.)  Ms. Johnson moved into the Chelsea Hotel, and its basement became her workroom. She fell hard for Mr. Cale, who was living there with the stunning Nico: “He was beautiful, brilliant, crazy and the funniest guy I’d ever been with.” She designed for the Velvets — Cale and his partner Lou Reed — and because she’d never done men’s wear before, she relished the compliment: “Lou said I cut a really good crotch.”  “We both recognized something going on between us: Our focus on work was a kind of loneliness,” Mr. Cale says. When he visited her parents in Connecticut, “they were like, ‘What?’ But they were ready for me; she was doing things to shock them all her life.”  They married in 1968, “with everybody from the Factory” present, Mr. Cale says. In their LaGuardia Place loft, “we were two little pipe-and-slippers kids,” Ms. Johnson says. “We loved each other, we each just wanted a friend.“ They tried to act suburban-married. “I cooked pot roasts on Sunday!” But the scene was not a perfect fit. Within several years, they had separated. But they have remained friends all these subsequent decades.  Ms. Johnson was looking ahead for new things to do as the decade was about to turn. As for me, in that muggy black summer of 1969, while Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and Ted Kennedy left a girl dead in the water off Chappaquiddick, I moved to Ibiza, where you could pretend that living with no electricity or indoor plumbing among beautiful people and savvy drug dealers was a healing experience. I sent my quixotic dispatches to Jann Wenner, who published them in his Eye-eclipsing Rolling Stone.  I came back to New York 10 months later. It was 1970. If you’ve ever lived an earlier portion of your life in a manner that can’t be explained without your sounding certifiable, you’ve probably collected examples of other women, real and fictional — they’ve Velcro’d themselves to your psyche, out of defensiveness and comfort — who exemplified the vaporous spirit of the age that governed the life you desired at the time.  In my collection are: Sue Graham leaving the bland, white Dakotas for New York City … and Charles Mingus; Susanna Moore’s masochistic female writer in her downtown-based novel “In the Cut”; the novelist Rachel Kushner’s tough-California-“Alice”-tumbled-down-the-rabbit-hole-of-the-All-Irony-’70s-New-York-art-scene in her “The Flamethrowers”; the sneering, guiltless older-musician-on-young-girl demi-molestation struggled with by the wounded, rapier-witted West 10th Street teenage vixen in Dylan Landis’s novel “Rainey Royal.” And the songs in Laura Nyro’s “Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.” When I first heard its haunting opening track, “Timer,” during my dazzling tumult, I almost fell on the floor in absolution. My nutty choice of boyfriend was sanctified into a spiritual journey.  One of the first things I did when I got back to town was rush over to Paraphernalia to buy some new dresses, one of them a forest green velvet, collared and cap-sleeved dance frock. The dress sent the message: You can make your own romance, and live it, and thrive. I asked Ms. Johnson, all these decades later, “That was yours, right?” “Yes!” she said.  Ms. Johnson, ahead of the curve, had by then started her Alley Cat line, which lasted for four years, while also participating in the opening of Betsey Bunky Nini, long a trendy boutique on the Upper East Side. In 1978, Ms. Johnson and business partner Chantal Bacon started Betsey Johnson, the namesake brand that was built into 60 boutiques worldwide.  She would push on and prevail, all the way through to this current decade. (How many people have had a steady design career for 50 years?) Breast cancer wouldn’t stop her. Three divorces wouldn’t stop her. Nor would single motherhood — her daughter, Lulu, 39, is her best friend. Chapter 11 wouldn’t stop her, in a business that “builds you up and spits you out and knocks you down,” as Fern Mallis, the former executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America describes the industry. “She just endures,” Ms. Mallis said. “She keeps on ticking.”  Ms. Johnson branded herself long before others: She’d made the ballet skirt over a leotard her signature dress, and she made her spiky white-blond hair and huge, red-lipped smile her signature look. She performed a cartwheel at the end of her runway shows (she does to this day). She racked up accolades: the Coty Award, the Pratt Institute Award, the CFDA’s Timeless Talent Award, several lifetime achievement prizes.  With her new business partner, the shoe king Steve Madden, and as creative director of her namesake brand (whose name Mr. Madden purchased in 2010), she is licensing dresses, sleepwear, jewelry, bedding, handbags, footwear, fragrance. She just did a stint on “Dancing With the Stars.”  Ms. Johnson designed for good girls who wanted to seem wild but who could turn back at zero hour, girls who knew that no adventure was really dangerous as long as you kept your wits and your work ethic. We wanted to bury our ingénue selves, and she became one of the first New York women at a very convenient noir moment when the available means for such burial were copious — as were, if you were smart and lucky, the means for self-reclamation. She found them both. And then, like any good seamstress, she cut the pattern for the rest of us.  An article last Sunday about the fashion designer Betsey Johnson misstated part of the name of an award she received from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. It is the Timeless Talent Award, not the Tireless Talent Award.
For a generation of women new to both New York and adulthood, there was no more exciting designer than Ms. Johnson. Fifty years later, she maintains that sway.