You have to respect the old lions in any line of work. It’s almost refreshing to visit with a 60-something sportswear designer who still takes inspiration from his customers and actually looks forward to overseeing the design of another season of products.

"If you design for active people, if you love the sport, you’re out there," Willy Bogner was saying Tuesday evening at the opening of his new boutique in Soho. "As sport is evolving, we are the communicators."

Time was Willy Bogner was synonymous with style and skiing, and he still is. He earned the spot, over decades, just as Calvin Klein’s name still rings with sex and sensuality, even though the latter is retired. Willie, an accomplished competitive skier who raced in the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley, has been an innovator, a forward-thinking designer who invented the idea of luxury skiwear, and a filmmaker who has sought to use the medium to convey the excitement of his great love for alpine sports. His boutique on Madison Avenue, which closed some years ago when rents went sky high, was pretty much a pit stop for a certain fashionable set making off to Aspen and Sun Valley, Chamonix and Zermatt.

He spent three years looking for a new New York location and a year putting the finishing touches on a 2,400-square-foot West Broadway boutique that surely will be nirvana for style-minded skiers. (The store was cleared for a party Tuesday, so we’ll have to return to view the merchandise…but we can save that for another day.)

Today, we’re talking about Willy. He popped back on our radar earlier this year when his longtime friend and countryman, Bernhard Langer, turned up on the leaderboard at The Players Championship in Bogner sportswear and a very hip, elegant pair of cargo pants. Some said Bernhard’s Bogner cargos weren’t fit for the fairway, but that would be selling short the pants, not to mention both Bernhard and Willy, their interest in style, and the obvious respect they have for the game.

Willy and his wife, Sonia, are golfers and, going way back, Willie introduced a golf line in the mid 1970s. In fact, Bogner provided Bernhard with sportswear at the start of Bernhard’s career in the early ’70s. In intervening years, Bernhard, like those Madison Avenue rents, became too expensive. A few years ago, however, Bernhard had apparently become wealthy enough to return to wearing sportswear with the Bogner label.

We asked Willy what his ideal day was and the old ski racer said: "Good weather, good snow, good friends. Could be heli-skiing in Canada or someplace in Russia."

And then, being that the snow isn’t particularly good in either the Northern or Southern hemisphere in October, he said he was headed to Scottsdale, Ariz., and The Boulders Resort in nearby Carefree, Ariz., to play some golf with his wife. He’s a seven; she’s a 21.

As someone who has dedicated as much of his career to ski cinematography as to sportswear design, Willy created a multimedia production for the store opening that was shown on five giant Bogner Vision Screens. The film included shots of the 1960 Olympics and wild ski-chase sequences from the James Bond film "The Spy Who Loved Me," which were shot by Willy.

With the brand’s emphasis on leisure time, and its appeal to the leisure class, we asked Willy if he was at all concerned about the tumultuous global economy that almost surely will affect discretionary spending.

"It’s going to be a stormy year," he said. "We feel we are a safe brand. We’ve been through many slowdowns before. People know if they buy a Bogner sweater, it’s a great investment." — Robert Lohrer