Star Struck Style

August 10 is Betsey Johnson’s birthday.

Betsey Johnson has an unusual chart with her natal planets occupying only 115° of the zodiac. Lopsided charts aren’t so uncommon, but a bundle this tight isn’t something that you see every day.

Bundle charts can reveal a focused individual. What’s interesting is that some astrologers who study Karmic implications of birth charts consider a tightly-bundled chart to reveal a “young soul.” I guess I believe that interpretation when I look at the woman. She never grows old, if you know what I mean.

There have been very few American designers who have had the staying power of Betsey Johnson. Chalk that up to her Leonine vitality! I can’t be sure if she has a Leo moon because I don’t have her time of birth, but the odds are that she does. She also has Mercury and Pluto in the same sign as her natal sun. Only three other signs are inhabited by planets in her horoscope: Saturn and Uranus in Gemini, Venus and Jupiter in Cancer, and Mars and Neptune in Virgo.

However, the most interesting thing about her chart is that despite all the planets being so close together, there is not a single close conjunction in her chart. Perhaps the moon sits near her sun, but only if she was born in the last couple of hours of the day. Otherwise, everything is spaced out in a manner that I have never seen in anyone’s natal chart. Only when Chiron is added to the mix does a conjunction occur (about a degree away from Johnson’s natal sun, smack dab in the middle of the bundle).

Surprisingly, for someone who is a picture of youth and vitality, Johnson has never exercised. Her lifestyle has kept her lean and healthy. I’ve seen that before in the charts of people who have Chiron personalized by placement. I’ve seen the opposite in the charts of people who have Chiron poorly aspected: they really have to work at being healthy. I was born during the 1966 opposition between Chiron and the Uranus/Pluto conjunction. Perhaps that is why so many people I grew up with are dead already. In my fifty-two years on this planet, I’ve known far too many people who have succumbed to the evils of drugs and alcohol.

But I digress! I would love to study this chart in depth if Betsey Johnson knew her birth time. Almost twenty years ago, I called her New York studio to find out her zodiac sign. The person who answered the phone asked someone else, and in the background I heard the designer herself shout out “I’M A LEO!” I should call back. I wonder if she would remember me?