Johnson Offers Bite-SizeBottoms for a Celebrity Crowd
It’s the lucky designer who can count teen queen Hilary Duff as her first customer and the cover of Blender magazine as her first press hit. Kristen Johnson accomplished both of these feats in one shot.
A stylist friend asked to borrow five pairs of shorts Johnson had designed for her own personal wardrobe to use in a photo shoot of Hilary Duff for Blender. Duff bought four pairs of the vintage-fabric shorts to wear for her nationwide tour in 2004 and left Johnson with incentive to start her own line.
“[Duff’s sale] is what put me in business,” Johnson said. “If someone’s going to buy them, I guess I should be making them.”
The Johnson line consists of shorts and pants in prints and plaids as sprightly as the fabric print names, which include “Japanese Party,” “Blue Bagpipe” and “Make a Wish.” Johnson plans to focus on bottoms but may add jackets to match the plaid and pin-striped wool-blend shorts and pants for next year.
Attention-grabbing prints on bite-size shorts are not for every shopper, so Johnson also offers mellower pants for the less adventurous. Her pants collection retains the label’s quirky attitude, featuring brown wool-blend pin-striped trousers with red silk pocket lining. And cropped pants come in traditional tweeds as well as busy plaids. “I’m trying to make something fun, different and funky but still wearable,” Johnson said.
The modest number of bodies in the line—three for Spring/Summer 2005 and five for Fall/Winter 2005—allows Johnson to give special attention to her clients when it comes to mixing and matching fabrics. Jennifer Nicholson’s now-closed boutique Mademoiselle Pearl wrote a special order for Johnson’s one-of-a-kind vintage-fabric shorts and modern-fabric shorts. “I want to do limited runs of vintage fabrics for certain stores because [customers and buyers] respond to the one-of-a-kind [pieces],” Johnson said.
Wholesale price points are $85 to $95 for short- and long-style shorts in cotton, $100 for cuffed silk shorts, and $135 to $150 for wool-blend cropped pants and trouser styles. The shorts sell briskly for approximately $250 a pair in boutiques such as Satine in West Los Angeles and Scoop in New York.
The petite shorts continue to have a coveted celebrity following, and Johnson said the young and hip Hollywood crowd is her primary market. Actresses Marisa Tomei, Kirsten Dunst and Lindsay Lohan have each been spotted buying a pair.
Johnson added that sunny, temperate weather makes Los Angeles the ideal location to set up shop because one can wear her shorts year round. —Rhea Cortado
