DESIGNER SPOTLIGHT : Heathyr Lucero and Mantrap Answer the Call of the Wild

By ROSE APODACA

July 24, 1992 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Since launching her company, Mantrap, in late 1990, junior wear designer Heathyr Lucero of Huntington Beach has straddled a fine line between sexy and sexist with her collections. She uses venturesome graphics on her tiny, Lycra clothing that’s attracting attention among the nightclub crowd in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Tokyo.

This past season she screened on the back of black hot pants the female silhouette seen on truck mud flaps--the same one that riled Thelma and Louise in last year’s film. One of her hottest sellers this year is an athletic-style T-shirt that features “Bimbo 10” in place of team and number.

But the flamboyant Lucero, who thinks of herself as a “twisted” feminist, means no harm. The girl just wants to have fun.

“My whole philosophy behind anything I’ve ever done in life is to have the most fun possible,” Lucero, 27, said from her studio. “I gear my designs so when people look at them, they think it’s humorous. I want it to just tickle you inside.”

She balks at the suggestion that her designs could encourage sexist attitudes. Instead, Lucero insists that wearing such symbols diminishes their power. “I’m not knocking women. Hey, I’m a chick.”

Lucero has spent her life relishing that she was born female. Her favorite color is pink. While growing up in Orange, she made gingham halter tops for herself and dresses for her dolls. “They were really horrible, but I was very proud of them,” she remembered.

Her parents divorced and she moved to Corona del Mar with her mother and sister when she was 13. The struggles of living in a single-parent household shaped her attitude. “That was an experience, because all those kids had lots of money and we didn’t. . . . I didn’t have every color of Chemin de Fers. But it paid off.”

She made her own clothes and prom dresses and developed a reputation for her designs and wild image.

In 1983, she took the $300 she received as graduation gifts, purchased cotton knit fabric, produced some merchandise and made the circuit of swap meets and home parties through the summer. “I served champagne, and girls would come over and buy my clothes,” she said. The result was a $2,000 profit.

That got her into the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, where at the end of the normal two-year term she was one of 10 students invited back for a third year to prepare a debut show. She was one of 50 student designers worldwide invited to show work in Switzerland. The pink-coiffed Lucero attracted the international press and inspired a standing ovation for her gowns.

Since she left the institute in 1986, Lucero has designed for several sportswear companies, including Team Gear, Maui & Sons and Vision Street Wear, where she headed the junior and boys lines. But the need to control her own destiny and create without constraints led Lucero to start her own company. The Mantrap name came from a film starring Marilyn Monroe, whom Lucero considers the quintessential femme fatale.

Basking in a sort of punkish glamour, Lucero said she loves anything that’s “colorful, wacky and girly.”

In February, she upholstered the furniture, the walls and the floor of her booth at the Action Sports Retailer Trade Show in hot pink fur with gold fixtures. It looked like a stuffed animal had exploded in a boudoir.

Her “dressing room” at home has a collection of wigs and hairpieces, fake eyelashes (including a pair trimmed in rhinestones), a rhinestone tiara among the heaps of costume jewelry, even an antique armoire just for the glamour outfits.

Lucero doesn’t see the grim economy as a need to tone down. She keeps her collection affordable ($16 to $60) and they’re available at Hard Times, Orange; Things for You, Newport Beach; Electric Chair, Huntington Beach; Rodan in Long Beach and L.A., and Nana’s in San Francisco.

“When life’s at its lowest, I just dress weirder, because it makes me feel better.”

For the future, Lucero wants to follow her heroes, designers John Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood, to the Paris couture shows and to streamline her wardrobe.

“One of these days I’d like to own one of those mechanical rotary racks they have at dry cleaners. Doesn’t Zsa Zsa have one of those?”