NEW YORK >> Over tea and toast at the Cafe Cluny in the West Village of Manhattan, Linda Rodin lifted her palms to her face and pulled her features taut. The gesture, one likely to be recognized by any number of Rodin’s contemporaries whose 30s are long behind them, seemed a wistful acknowledgment that the past is irretrievable.

So what.

Rodin is aiming neither to recover her youth nor to live her life according to some outmoded precept of what is age-appropriate. “That just never occurred to me,” she said.

A maverick to the core, she has traveled in style spheres for more than four decades, first as a photographer’s assistant and later as a retail pioneer, venturing to SoHo in 1979 to found Linda Hopp, one of the area’s first fashion boutiques.

As a stylist, she lent zhoosh to the wardrobes of Madonna, Halle Berry, Bob Dylan and Gisele Bundchen. She eventually moved to the front of the camera, becoming a familiar figure in the ad campaigns of J. Crew and the Row. By the mid-2000s she had sealed her reputation as an innovator with the introduction of Rodin Olio Lusso, a “clean,” jasmine-scented confection of essential oils that grew out of a mixture she brewed in her bathroom. She was 59.

Now, at 74, she is once again confounding expectations with a small Linda Hopp denim collection, her first foray into fashion in more than 40 years. The moment seemed right, Rodin said. “I’m not thinking, ‘I’m 74. Why am I making jeans?’”

Among the collection’s highlights are a laced-at-the-bosom denim tunic worn over jeans, gingham-cuffed jeans. There is a slender maxi-skirt with a flamboyant fishtail hem and a pleated mini that Rodin wears in photographs over skinny pants slit at the ankle. The items, made in New York, are offered in extra-small to large sizes. Prices will range from about $450 to $1,200.

Rodin, far from an imposing figure in person — she is 5-foot-5 — towers in the imagination of her fans, a snowy-haired beacon to many who like to believe that one can bend or toss the rules at any age.

They follow her on Instagram, where she models her designs, including a denim jacket, unconventionally paired with a wide tulle skirt, and a pearl-seeded top with extravagantly flared denim trousers. Her image routinely crops up on Pinterest as well, as a distinctive figure in her signature updo and large black-rimmed shades. She is often called an icon but shrugs off the label.

“When I think of icons, I think of Audrey Hepburn or Brigitte Bardot or somebody really extraordinary,” Rodin said. “I am so not that person.”

She does, however, tend to follow her own lead, inclined to regard every challenge as a fresh opportunity. Consider her farsighted SoHo boutique: a gallerylike space that she opened, she said, on a wing and a prayer. An aspiring photographer, she had tracked down props and styled models for photographer Gosta Peterson, who playfully rechristened her Linda Hopp, after the swing-era Lindy Hop.

Soon enough, Rodin recalled, “I realized that I liked producing pictures, not shooting them.”

A friend suggested that she open a store, and when a space became available on West Broadway, then a mostly barren street, Rodin set up shop. Her new vocation suited her. “It lets me put all my instincts together in a good way,” she said at the time. “It’s like one long styling job.”

She showcased designers who were just beginning to build followings. They included Diane Pernet, now a celebrated fashion writer, who created a Bauhaus dress, red on one side, black on the other. And the store stocked minimalist creations by Calvin Klein and avant-garde looks by Norma Kamali, pieces that defied easy categorization.

“I wanted to have nothing trendy,” Rodin said. “If you’re spending $500 or $600, you don’t want to be out of style the next year.”

Those designer labels hung alongside her own designs. Some, including a red wool bomber with dolman sleeves, had a gender-free appeal as relevant now as it was in 1980, when Bergdorf Goodman featured Linda Hopp designs in her own in-store boutique.

Her what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach has a multigenerational appeal, one duly noted a half-dozen years ago by Good Housekeeping, when the magazine conferred on Rodin its Awesome Women award. She was listed alongside former Facebook executive Randi Zuckerberg; Amy Robach, then a news anchor on “Good Morning America”; and actress and activist Geena Davis and their high-profile ilk.

“Ask young fashion editors to name their idols, and a certain gray-haired, nearsighted, makeup-shunning 68-year-old makes everyone’s list,” the editors gushed.

“Maybe these people were thinking, ‘How can I be like you when I grow up?’” Rodin said recently. “They find it, I guess, inspiring to think that as an older person you can still wear jeans and miniskirts.”

Within bounds. “If I wear a miniskirt, I cover up with tights.” she said. “But I don’t feel otherwise limited about the way I like to dress.”

There are brakes on Rodin’s ambition. “I want to be slow fashion,” she said. She plans to offer limited runs through lindahopp.com. “I’m not going to have a stockroom with 100 pairs of jeans.”

She is cautious, with cause. In 2014 the Estee Lauder Cos. bought Rodin Olio Lusso for an undisclosed sum. It was one of the smallest labels the beauty conglomerate had acquired. Two and a half years later, she left, disenchanted with Lauder’s handling of the line. In 2021, Lauder announced that its Olio Lusso e-commerce business would close.

“Now I don’t want to lose sight of what really makes me happy,” Rodin said. She likes working on a small scale, with meticulous attention to detail. But she is not about to fixate on every stitch and seam.

“You know, I can’t sew on a button,” she confided. Long ago she tried. “I ended up attaching a button to the shirt I was sewing and the nightgown I was wearing.”

Still, for Rodin, the return to fashion represents a homecoming of sorts. From an early age, her style sense was whimsical. “I might have been 7 or 8, and I dreamed of a pair of white majorette boots and outfits that matched,” she said.

“Now I have 100 pairs of snow white shoes,” she said, joking.

While that playfulness is reflected in her line, she has become more practical. She recalled her SoHo boutique as “a small, curated business that I started from scratch.”

She has no problem building on that model. “There is no race to the top,” she said. “Slow and steady is my credo.”

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