Betsey Johnson Purges Her Collection
What do you do when you’re selling your Hamptons house and downsizing? Have a yard sale, of course.
Even Betsey Johnson, the well-known fashion designer, went the yard sale route to unload some of her possessions as she put her East Hampton house on the market. About 10,000 articles of clothing that she has collected over her more than 50 years in the fashion industry went up for grabs at bargain prices last weekend in a yard sale on her front lawn at 25 Grape Arbor Lane, and it will continue this weekend. “I accumulated a ton,” Ms. Johnson said Tuesday from her new house in Malibu, Calif. “I’m a hoarder. I should have been on that show.”
Hoarding may be harsh, but she certainly has amassed quite a collection of vintage clothing — some of which is an unofficial archive of her work — in addition to keeping original designs and leftover stock, all the feminine and whimsical designs for which she is best known. “There are a couple of pieces from Paraphernalia, some from Alley Cat, my ’70s junior line . . . and there’s the punk period of the late-’70s-early-’80s and right up to the time we closed two years ago,” she said. “Nobody would be crazy enough to make any of that stuff anymore. I think my true blue customer really appreciates it more than ever because she knows she can’t get anything — close, yes — but she can’t get that real me anymore.”
She is also selling shoes, bags, accessories, and even furniture, but “the clothing is the star,” said Mark Vitulano, a longtime friend of Ms. Johnson’s who has organized the yard sale for her. “We sold so much and it doesn’t look like we sold anything,” he said of the first weekend of the sale.
“If I lived 1,000 years I couldn’t wear everything,” Ms. Johnson said.
The designer is know for finishing her runway shows with a cartwheel, and many of the items on offer are off those runways, but there is also a lot of “real stuff, wearable stuff,” she said. When she closed up stores, like the one she had in the Reutershan parking lot in East Hampton over a decade ago, she often kept the leftover inventory. There are some production samples with pins still in them. “It’s a shame that an archivist can’t get a hold of it,” Mr. Vitulano said.
He convinced her to “let it go,” as she could not possibly take it all with her to California, where she moved to be closer to her daughter, Lulu, and her two grandchildren, 7 and 9 years old. She’s living in a “grandma’s cottage” on her daughter’s property, she said. “I took the right amount with me out here because I knew I would just have to put it in storage again. It is time for me to face up to realizing I have no room for everything,” she said.
Then there’s the East Hampton house — also for sale. The 2,900-square-foot, 4-bedroom, 3.5-bath farmhouse on 1.65 acres is listed with Sotheby’s International Realty for just under $2 million. “I decided to get that house when I knew I was free from my breast cancer in 2000,” after renting about a mile and half away the summer before. It was the first of 10 houses a real estate agent showed her in a single day, and while she had to do a complete gut job, she knew it was for her. “I fell in love with the house, and then I went on a decorating spree out there. It was total happiness.”
The house became “a little hideaway escape,” a great balance for her work life back in Manhattan, she said. She spent time “antiquing and junk-storing,” and being creative in a way that she said is different than creating her whimsical designs. “As much as work is creative, there’s nothing like your own house.”
Perhaps nothing better exemplifies her creativity than the walls. She wallpapered the entire house in “hugely expensive English cabbage rose 27-silkscreen fabric” that she had to have specially backed with paper. “I could have bought a big fancy car for what I did,” she said. “I just hope that it goes to a buyer who doesn’t rip the wallpaper down.”
“I love the property. I love the location. I love East Hampton as the town. I loved my time out there, but I lived the East Hampton life. Fifteen years ago, I went to the clubs,” she said. Ms. Johnson, who turns 73 on Monday, shows no signs of slowing down. She will retain her apartment in Manhattan and live the bi-coastal life. She remains the creative director of her brands, owned by Steve Madden since 2010, and will be back in New York later this month and in September to prepare for her fashion shows, which celebrate the half a century her name has appeared on a label. “It’s the big bang year for me in terms of, whoa, 50 years,” she said. So her move, and her purge, are “what I needed. I needed a new step, a new change.”
The yard sale will continue Friday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and if there is anything left over, it may continue again on Labor Day weekend.