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On a crackling-cold winter day, fashion designer John Bartlett apologizes for his bad "hat hair," but it's one of those times when stylish appearance definitely takes a back seat to physical comfort. Bartlett, wearing a red and black plaid lumberjack shirt, faded old blue jeans, and hiking boots, looks more like a familiar college friend than a cutting edge New York fashion designer.

Bartlett has only been in business for 3 1/2 years, but the 32 year-old has already made a name for himself as an innovative men's fashion designer, garnering a Perry Ellis Award for new fashion talent from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. His collections are now sold to stores by Onward Kashiyama, a distribution agent which also represents groovy Todd Oldham and fashion editor favorite, Paris-based designer Helmut Lang. Bartlett's clothes are carried at prestigious retailers like Charivari, Bloomingdales, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Joyce in Hong Kong, and Holt Renfrew in Canada.

How did a Catholic boy from Cincinnati do it?

Bartlett was the middle kid of three siblings in Ohio. "Ever since I remember, I've loved clothes," he says. The uniforms he wore in Catholic school from the age of six to eighteen had a lasting effect: "I love menswear because it has a lot of perimeters and rules," he says now. "It's all about subtlety."

When John Bartlett was in high school, he came out to his parents, and then went off to study sociology at Harvard. "In college, everyone was reading Sylvia Plath and dying their clothes black," says Bartlett. "Depression was very chic. But I'd wear a great old Burberry coat with a skirt. I had green or red or purple hair, and wore eight scarves at a time. My mother was visually shaking at the airport when I arrived home." After a stint on the diving team at Harvard, Bartlett quit because he felt the group was homophobic.