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The designer Betsey Johnson is an unmistakable presence, even on these patchwork streets crowded with exhibitionists, goofballs, ding-dongs and eccentrics all competing for a second glance. Traffic doesn’t screech to a halt when she passes by, but at least one police officer stops to give her an admiring hug.

Johnson is not just style. She is a walking expression of youthful joy, inspirational stamina and several lifetimes’ worth of accomplishments.

A tiny woman, she favors dropped-crotch leggings, tight rocker-chick T-shirts and a pair of frog-shaped coin purses that she swears are stitched out of actual amphibian carcasses. She wears makeup unrepentantly, eschewing any goal of a Bobbi Brown natural face to delight in the daily invention of an artificial one.

“I could put makeup on all day,” Johnson says. “It calms me down.”

Her distinctive hairstyle – somewhere in the vicinity of braids, dreadlocks or the ropelike mop of a rag doll – is currently a platinum bob with streaks of taxicab yellow. Getting it to the perfect state of bed-head dishevelment requires the aid of a stylist who commutes from the West Coast to New York four times a year, where he attends to Johnson’s locks for a marathon 12 hours each visit. Looking haphazardly thrown together takes time.

At 72, Johnson epitomizes the mood – and the look – of her brand, which speaks most directly to adolescent girls and women in their 20s, young birds who are looking for adventure and independence and who camouflage their fears and doubts with swagger and recklessness.

Johnson’s clothes are commercial, which is to say they are less about appealing to magazine editors and celebrity stylists and more about attracting mass-market customers who do not want to spend a fortune on a dress. She loves crinolines, sequins, slip dresses and the color pink. Her clothes offer bad-girl attitude without the cleavage or the drug haze – and for less than $200 a frock.

Johnson is celebrating her 50th year in fashion, a feat that is rare because tastes are unpredictable, clothing production is complicated and retail is an unforgiving enterprise.

Her design heyday was the 1960s, when the fashion industry was not yet swarming with would-be designers, celebrities seeking synergy and Instagram stars.

Yet Johnson has endured because, just a few millimeters below that exterior of overdrawn false eyelashes and candy-colored hair, there is a determined, hard-working, competitive woman – a former prom queen from middle-class New England – who is under no illusions about her niche in the fashion industry.

She received the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America this month.

“I’m very commercial-minded,” Johnson says. “I’m very Connecticut; I’m Doris Day. I’m very much an all-American girl. I was a Brownie and a Girl Scout.”

All for fashion

Johnson’s workroom on West 38th Street in the Garment District is small, like a studio apartment. She’s been installed here about two years, since filing Chapter 11.

The front door is covered with Crayola drawings by her granddaughters, age 6 and 9. Inside, the single room is filled to capacity with crinolines that hang from the ceiling like hundreds of cumulus clouds in shades of ivory, tan and blush. Lingerie-style dresses are stuffed alongside brightly colored sequin dresses on rolling racks. Parasols are propped inside an umbrella stand. Plastic boxes piled against a wall are labeled by their contents: belts, sunglasses, tights. Bolts of leopard-print fabric await inspiration.

Johnson’s aesthetics are founded on the persona of a suddenly liberated, fun-seeking good girl and that was precisely who Johnson was when she began.

She was the middle child, sandwiched between an older sister and a younger brother. Her father was an engineer, and her mother was a homemaker and later a high school guidance counselor. Both were steeped in kindness and common sense.

She graduated from Syracuse University where cheerleading was her passion. Her first dream was to be a dancer, but mostly she wanted to move to New York.

In 1964, she won a contest to be a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, which was a bit like an extended internship. It included a trip to London, where she saw fashion’s “Youthquake” up close.

Johnson never studied design, but she knew how to sew, and that provided a way to make extra money. Her career began with a “hippie-dippie” T-shirt, made in her Brooklyn apartment, that looked hand-crocheted. It had long sleeves and a little velvet bow along the neckline.

“I was creating something you (couldn’t) get anywhere else,” Johnson says. “I was like a horse with blinders on. I was unaware of a lot of stuff. I was optimistic.”

The magazine recommended her for a design position at Paraphernalia, a new Manhattan clothing boutique deeply influenced by London. “At Paraphernalia, I learned that you’re only as good as your last sale,” she says.

Johnson socialized with a creative crowd, settling in at Max’s Kansas City, a clubhouse for artists such as Andy Warhol and designers including Stephen Burrows. She had found the crowd and the spirit she longed for.

She married – and eventually divorced – John Cale, a founder of the Velvet Underground, the band whose music presaged generations of rock to come. She was friendly with the influential designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, who in the ’70s helped make knitwear sexy.

He encouraged her to start her own label. She hesitated. But then, “an astrologer told me to just do it,” Johnson says.

The seed money came from Bayer aspirin. She was a freelance designer when the advertising agency for Bayer came calling in search of a hipster spokesperson.

“They were doing a commercial with (actor) Ozzie Nelson and (golfer) Lee Trevino, and I said, ‘I don’t think my customers will buy my clothes if I start promoting a product’ – this was the early 1970s. But it was $10,000,” Johnson says. “So I called back and said, ‘Everyone in my family has taken Bayer aspirin. I don’t feel like I’m lying.’ ” She ultimately earned $60,000 from the ad.

She partnered with her friend Chantal Bacon. They raised $40,000 from friends and family and took out a bank loan.

The Betsey Johnson label debuted in 1978.

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