Who

The multi-tasking Rowley is a fashion designer, author, TV personality and all-round lifestyle guru.

Backstory

Rowley says she was just seven when she started designing clothes, turning a shower curtain into a dress and socks into leg warmers. The Illinois native attended the Art Institute of Chicago and started selling dresses to Marshall Field & Co. while she was still in school. Shortly after graduation, she decamped to New York, starting her line with $3,000 in seed money from her grandmother and audaciously inviting every big name fashion editor to attend her first fashion show inside her tiny walkup apartment. (None showed up.) But Rowley kept at it, and by 1994 she'd won her first CFDA award thanks to her vintage-style dresses with whimsical twists, which caught on with girls looking for something in between preppy and frilly. By the end of the '90s, she'd expanded with men's lines, accessories and eyewear, sold at her own boutiques and department stores across the country.

Of note

Rowley's Fashion Week shows still draw a crowd, but these days her clothes seem to have taken a backseat to her numerous other ventures, including books, TV appearances, dishes, and a line of housewares at Target. With former Times staffer (and best friend) Ilene Rosenzweig she published Swell: A Girls Guide to the Good Life, which has since spawned other Swell books like Home Swell Home, Swell Holiday and The Swell Dressed Party. In 2007, Rowley released a whimsical autobiography called Slim: A Fantasy Memoir. She's been on TV as a judge on the reality show HGTV Design Star, and has launched a line of makeup with Avon and baby strollers with Graco. And although there continue to be Cynthia Rowley stores in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and East Hampton, she's even more popular in Japan, where she now has more than 50 boutiques.

Personal

Rowley married her first husband, Tom Sullivan, in 1988; he passed away six years later. In 1996, she married sculptor Bill Keenan. (Mayor Rudy Giuliani officiated.) In 2005 she tied the knot for a third time, to writer Bill Powers. Rowley has two daughters: Kit, who was born in 1999, and Gigi, who arrived in 2005. During the week Rowley and Powers live in a West Village townhouse with a swimming pool in the backyard, and spend weekends on Long Island. Rowley ditched her four-bedroom house in East Hampton for a surfer's shack in Montauk with a vintage Airstream trailer, which she uses as a mini-guesthouse, parked in the backyard.

Drama

After purchasing a West Village townhouse for $2.5 million in 2004 and beginning a renovation of the building, she was immediately the target of complaints by tenants, who accused her of dangerous and dirty conditions. In 2006 she sued one of her tenants for $1 million for calling her a "slumlord."

For the record

Rowley is the model for the fictional Victory Ford in her good friend Candace Bushnell's novel/TV show, Lipstick Jungle.