Designer Believes Adventurous Women Defy All Age Limitations

“Who’s the grandmother anymore?” 47-year-old Holly Harp asks.

“Nobody could restrain me from wearing my short lame dress with glitter hose and going out with my young boyfriend.”

Harp’s not a grandmother, but she counts adventurous women of middle--or any--age as among her customers. That includes herself.

“I still have the sexy little girl in me that won’t quit,” she says. “I’m still going to flirt and show my legs.”

Always Herself

And she’s still going to arrive for an interview, just as herself, in red-and-black tiger leggings, tunic, scarf and lioness hair. No shrinking violet.

On a recent afternoon at Alley, in West Hollywood, she darted between clients who were trying on outfits from her new 50-piece fall dress collection.

L.A.-based Harp, who has been designing for two decades, last year gave up her Holly’s Harp boutique on Sunset Boulevard to concentrate on wholesaling. The change does not mean a new design tack. The new dresses are in “the same mood I’m always in--frivolity and beauty,” she says. “I just make a new brew every season.”

Hollywood inspires that brew. “I watch those old movies and I always feel my adrenaline pumping,” she says.

Floaty chiffons, jersey lame and cut velvet all appear in this latest group.

“I’ve always done things that were diaphanous and poetic,” she states.

But she didn’t always feel comfortable about it. For years she wondered how her things measured up to other designers.

‘Obedient Streak’

“I have that obedient streak. I want to please everyone. But now I accept my place in the scheme of things without much struggle,” says Harp, whose dresses are sold in a couple of Los Angeles-area boutiques and at Henri Bendel in New York.

If her dresses haven’t changed much in 20 years, women have, Harp says.

“I used to get the comment that my clothes are too ‘boudoir.’ Now they don’t frighten women anymore. There are more people who feel sensual about themselves. They don’t have to hide behind too much structure. There’s a sexiness about these clothes. They’re not little suits of armor.”

Though Harp works long hours when necessary, she admits: “I can very easily choose comfort over money.”

She talks of frequent workouts at the gym, and of the L.A. night life that keeps her visually stimulated. One recent night, she got stuck in an elevator with a man dressed wildly in snakeskin and fringe. It made her day.

“I want to stand in an elevator with that kind of man,” she beams. “It helps me to breathe more freely to be around people who express themselves.”