Like a Kid Playing Dress-Up

When Cynthia Rowley’s ego swells and she fears it may take off and lumber through the streets of Manhattan like the giant Stay-Puft marshmallow man in “Ghost- busters,” she returns to her childhood home in Barrington, Ill., population 9,000. There, she and her mother play a scene guaranteed to deflate any grandiosity fostered by success in the fashion industry:

“Mom, I won the Council of Fashion Designers of America Award as Best New Talent,” Cynthia says.

“That’s nice, dear.”

“Mom, I just opened my fourth store. Now we have ‘em in New York, Chicago, Tokyo and Los Angeles.”

“That’s nice, dear. Do you want mashed potatoes or hash browns with dinner?”

Clementine Rowley is not too impressed that her 37-year-old daughter has been described in glossy magazines as one of the coolest designers in the country or that David Letterman recently introduced her as one of America’s hottest. She knows that even though Cynthia’s style swerves toward the wacky, her temperature is consistently normal.

“Living in the Midwest makes you a little wholesome, I think,” the designer says. “I have a farm there that I bought as an investment because I’m kind of old-fashioned and, you know, I wanted land. I go down and look at it every now and then, especially when I start to feel like Miss Fancy Pants in New York. You go back home and you see that fashion isn’t, like, a glamorous thing. It’s more about function.”

Growing up near the chilly Wisconsin border, with a grandmother given to such statements as, “People just wear glasses because they don’t want to try,” Rowley became a kind of Annie Hall for the ‘90s, an earthbound sprite with a whimsical style sense and a pragmatic nature. La di da.

Her clothes make a case for not taking fashion, or yourself, too seriously. The full-skirted shirtdress printed with plump lemons isn’t something you’d wear for jury duty on a capital case. But it would be a hit at Disneyland. Most of Rowley’s designs are similarly lighthearted: halter dresses perfect for backyard barbecues at the Bradys, hipster pants and colorful shifts that Gidget would be proud to own.

Bloomingdale’s gave Rowley her own in-store boutique. Saks Fifth Avenue hangs her clothes in an area it calls Young Couture. “There’s always a demand for things that are fun,” says Saks President Rose Marie Bravo. “Cynthia has wit and style and her clothes are well-made. She seems to pick up on a lot of trends that are out there, but she does them in her own way.”

Although she wrinkles her nose at being called her own best model, everything hanging in Rowley’s weeks-old Beverly Hills boutique would look great on her. She is pretty, petite and curvy, with shiny black hair swept into a high ponytail. She speaks in a Valley Girl’s patois, delivered with vowels as flat as a cornfield. She likes to refer to herself and others in uppercase titles. Her mother, a flea market shopper with a knack for spotting nascent trends, is “Psychic Fashion Designer.” Her father, a retired science teacher, is “The Plaid Man.” With a professional comedian’s unshakable deadpan, she’s a natural-born storyteller.

There’s the tale of how she got started in the fashion business, for example. She had made her first dress at age 7, somehow managing to trace a pattern around her own body as she lay on the living room floor. While commuting one Friday morning via the el train to fashion design classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, a passenger admired her jacket. When Rowley explained that it was her own design, the Marshall Field buyer whipped out a card and asked her to bring in her line on Monday. One trip to the fabric store and a weekend of sewing later, Rowley showed up with five garments.

“What’s the style number on that?” the buyer asked, fingering a teal velveteen jacket with suede trim.

“Ummmm, one,” Rowley ad-libbed.

The buyer liked the next piece too and again inquired, “What’s the style number?”

“Two,” she replied.

The buyer guessed the next three numbers, ordered eight pieces and reordered when those sold quickly. Rowley’s eight-piece senior project sold to Henri Bendel in New York. In 1983, she pocketed $3,000 from an Art Institute fellowship and a $1,000 gift from her grandmother, packed her sewing machine into a U-Haul and drove to New York. The theme from “The Beverly Hillbillies” could have been playing on the truck’s radio.

“I was so naive,” she says. Her design schooling had emphasized creativity but neglected practical training. “I was totally out of touch. Why wouldn’t somebody buy a swimsuit with wings on it? I remember the first time people told me I could get a factory to sew my stuff. ‘Really? Excellent!’ Everything was new to me. It took a long time for me to understand fashion as commerce.”

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Rowley says she would have made fewer mistakes if she had ever worked for someone else. But for years she saved money by doing her own designing, sewing, selling, order packing and finance managing. “For eight years there was just enough encouragement for me to keep going,” she recalls.

New York’s Seventh Avenue is strewn with the bodies of flashy designers who wanted too much, too fast. Rowley took one small step at a time, moving from a hovel of a studio (she sent buyers Mace along with invitations to see the line) to a larger space in a still grody neighborhood before finally moving up to the prestigious building that houses Ralph Lauren’s and Donna Karan’s showrooms.

Today, Rowley’s dresses sell for $175 to $225. In the ostentatious ‘80s, she ran into price snobbery as entrenched as it was stupid. “People really thought that if it wasn’t expensive, it couldn’t be good,” she says. “I never did expensive things, so nobody cared. It was like, ‘Oh, if that’s what it costs she’s not really a designer.’ ”

Shoppers gradually caught up with Rowley, recognizing that pricey designer clothes sometimes have more psychological than real value.

“I understand that some people feel better in things that are really expensive, but my stuff is for everyone who’s already been through years of therapy,” she says. “They can wear the expensive stuff during the week when they have to feel big and important, and on the weekend when they just want to be comfy and have fun, they can wear my stuff.”

Rowley identifies her customer as a woman in her 20s, 30s, maybe early 40s, but occasionally sees teenagers and their grandmothers successfully shopping her stores together.

The creativity, originality and variety evident in her biannual runway shows prove she is more than a stylist or knockoff artist, descriptions that fit many others in her price range. Even so, she understands the importance of becoming known to the public: Once she has an established identity as a designer, then it logically follows that anything with her name on it communicates her star power. Last month, she became the first fashion designer guest on Letterman’s “Late Show” and squeezed an appearance on “Politically Incorrect” into her L.A. visit. “Entertainment Tonight” and the E! network covered the store opening here, but requests from People and InStyle to photograph her upcoming wedding were denied.

It makes sense for Rowley’s customers to know her, because there is so much of her in the clothes. Every dress tells a story: The map dress commemorates a trip Rowley took with her fiance, and the outfit of upholstery fabric is an homage to a similar costume her mother once made to wear to a party, only to find herself seated in a matching chair. The Rainbow Wedding group of pastel flocked dresses and coats is a nostalgic salute to the tacky Midwestern tradition of dressing each bridesmaid in a different color, with the guys in coordinating tuxedo shirts.

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Still, a nasty pea of insecurity lurks beneath the princess’ high-profile mattress. “I don’t know why people want to know anything about me, because I’m really just like a geek,” she says. “I’m always afraid I’m going to get busted. Someone’s going to find out that I’m not glamorous or sophisticated.”

Most of the time, though, she’s too busy to worry. Fifteen years after she fell in love with a photographer she later married, he died of cancer at 32. If she has seemed fearless in her career, it is because she has learned from painful experiences. “I think anybody can do anything and you should just do it and don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t. Just try it and if you fail, so what? At least you tried. I’m so grateful and happy every day to be doing what I’m doing. That we can have our own stores, all that stuff. Wow, I can’t believe it. I just feel that it’s really lucky.”

On Saturday, Rowley will again be a bride when she marries Bill Keenan, a sculptor and architect. After the ceremony in New York’s City Hall, the 180 guests will be shepherded into buses and driven to an old airfield for a reception in a candlelit hangar. Five days before the wedding, she still hadn’t decided what to wear, but Keenan’s black suit and acid green tie were ready.

He seems perpetually amused by his role in the continuing Life with Cynthia sitcom, and since his niece and nephew call him Uncle Silly, he’s uniquely suited for it. “Cynthia has this list of things she’s never done. Not a real list, but a mental one,” he says. “One weekend we went hot-air ballooning because it was on the list.” They take pride in being the only adults in their neighborhood with a trampoline in their apartment.

Verbal communication is not unknown to the couple, but when they go out to dinner, each often takes out a pad and draws. Inventions. Ideas. Sculptures and clothes. Keenan once sketched a store that looked like a blue head with two stories of yellow hair, and the Japanese trading company that is Rowley’s partner in her Asian ventures actually built it.

There is always so much to design. Rowley’s company manufactures hats and handbags. Licensees make shoes, knitwear, hosiery, shearling coats and eyeglasses. She warns her mother not to read too much into it, but Rowley loves to design children’s clothes, little party dresses for a brave, talented girl with a ponytail and a daffy sense of humor who thinks the world is a wondrous place.