1950s designer fashion

Oscar de la Renta

Fashion Designer

550 Seventh Avenue New York NY 10018

(212) 354-6777)

www.oscardelarenta.com

If there is a New World aristocracy, Oscar de la Renta is its aesthetic personification. Urbane and elegant, he has clothed his life with manifestations of beauty just as he clothes the world with his design creations. Whether moving through the dazzling world of haute couture or rejuvenating with his wife, Annette, in the gardened and art-filled paradises of his vast country estates, his is a life defined by perfect style and astounding beauty. Completing the gracious portrait--for he is an aristocrat in the very best sense--de la Renta is known for the noblesse oblige of his philanthropies, both in his adopted New York, and in his native Dominican Republic.

Interviewed in his sunny, eighth-floor office on New York's Seventh Avenue, de la Renta is dressed stylishly in a cotton-crisp three-piece suit. His desk is filled with papers, letters, perfume samples. On the wall there is a portrait of Hillary Clinton seated on a red couch and dressed in an Oscar de la Renta design, an elegant black dress. Next to his office is a mirror-filled showroom where his latest pret-a-porter designs are being modeled for department store buyers. De la Renta is gentlemanly, almost delicate, in his manners. And although he is 69, he looks fifty-something. His eyes move with excitement as he speaks, and he expresses himself in a tumble of rapid hut oddly hesitant sentences--jumping into a new thought before quite finishing the last. You are reminded that de la Renta is, after all, not a wordsmith, but a man who expresses his innermost being through his art.

The first Latin American couture designer ever to achieve worldwide renown, de la Renta's fairy-tale story may seem far removed from those of the other successful Latino men and women interviewed on these pages. Indeed, de la Renta himself identifies little with many of his fellow Hispanics with whom he shares the word "immigrant."

"I came here and never, for even a moment, was part of the Latin American community. I came to work in the United States. I wanted to triumph by becoming part of mainstream society. As a Latino I really haven't had any bad experiences to tell you about, because the door was wide open for me when I came.

"I was born right," he adds, "because all kinds of opportunities have been available to me when I needed them."

Born right de la Renta may have been, but to the manor he was not. The only boy among six sisters, Oscar was born to the family insurance business--or so his father would have had it--in the Dominican city of Santo Domingo.

"My father had an insurance company. And although my mother's brother was among the great Dominican poets, and I also had aunts who painted, that kind of thing was always a hobby in my family, never a profession. But I didn't see myself selling insurance policies or hounding people to pay their premiums."

Dealt a four-of-a-kind hand in the genetic shuffle, Oscar recognized, early on, his true direction. "Even as a child I thought a lot about what I wanted to do, and even then I wanted to be a painter. But if I'd told my father I wanted to be a fashion designer, it would have given him a heart attack. Even accepting the idea that I was going to be a painter was very difficult for him."

Yet from the artistic side of the family there was a cheering section: "I had the good luck that my mother always supported me in my dreams," he recalls fondly.

Opportunity presented itself to the young boy, in the first of its many manifestations, in the form of a Franciscan priest. "In the church where I was altar boy, there was a priest who was almost like a second father to me. He was the one who really encouraged me in my painting and who gave me my first drawing pencils and watercolor set and that kind of thing."

At the age of 15, Oscar was able to persuade his father to send him to the Fine Arts Academy of Santo Domingo. He recounts: "All my schoolmates were five years older than me, because normally you entered the Academy after completing high school. But I entered the Academy and started high school at the same time, which meant I was in school from seven in the morning until seven at night.

"I did all that to prove to my father that I was serious about what I wanted to do."

Once graduated from the Academy, de la Renta would have liked to continue his studies in Paris. But he knew his father would never allow it.

"It would have been like asking him to send me to another planet," he recalls.

So at the age of 18 he decided to go to Spain, "to a great school," the Royal Academy of Arts of San Fernando in Madrid.

That was where, driven by necessity, he began to get involved in fashion design.

"My mother died, and my father remarried and began to pressure me to put this painting silliness behind me. I understand his way of thinking, that as the only son in the family, I was supposed to work in something practical.

Determined not to return to Santo Domingo and the insurance business, de la Renta cast about for a way to support himself in Spain. As luck would have it, he had a schoolmate who did fashion illustrations for the Spanish newspapers; through him, de la Renta got started doing the same.

Then opportunity again presented itself when, through another friend, he met Cristobal Balenciaga, one of the great haute couture designers of the 1950s and 60s. De la Renta recounts: "Balenciaga lived in Paris, but he remained very Spanish and had a house of haute couture in Madrid where he showed his collections after showing them in France. He offered me a job there as a fashion illustrator."

"That was where I began to fall in love with fashion design. Before, I drew very well technically, but I didn't know anything about design because I had never studied it. But I ended up studying in the best school of all, because Balenciaga is one of the best designers of the twentieth century."

De la Renta eventually became Balenciaga's design assistant. Later he decided to try his luck in Paris, where be got a job as couture assistant to Antonio del Castillo at Lanvin.

"When I started out in France I said to myself, what are the most important houses in Paris? Dior and Lanvin. But I didn't speak French, so the only house of fashion where I could work was at Lanvin, with Antonio del Castillo."

In 1963, at the age of 29, de la Renta decided to try his luck in the United States. He ended up getting the job of haute couture coordinator for Elizabeth Arden, then the grande dame of American couture design at 80 years of age.

"Antonio del Castillo had worked for five years with her, and so I knew a lot about her. Arden, along with Revlon, had the two most important fashion companies in the United States at that time. I had put together a portfolio and asked all my friends in this country to give me letters of recommendation to help me get in to see all the important people, and I came here to New York to interview. That's how I ended up with Elizabeth Arden.

"Actually," de la Renta continues, laughing, "I think one of the reasons she hired me was because she knew I was working with Castillo and taking away his assistant was her revenge."

Amazingly, it was not until arriving in the United States that de la Renta finally gave up his first childhood love--painting.

"All the years I lived Spain and then in Paris, I continued painting, but when I arrived in the United States and tried to maintain my contacts in the world of art and painting, tried to send collections to exhibit in London, Paris, Madrid, I realized that if I wanted to do something important, wanted to have great success in fashion design, I needed to dedicate myself to that and leave painting aside."

There were no regrets, he adds. De la Renta was with Arden for two and a half years, designing haute couture. But convinced that pret-a-porter--off-the-rack wear--was the future of fashion design, de la Renta convinced Arden to try selling clothes designs in department stores in the way she already sold her perfumes.

"At first she agreed and asked me to take charge of the new product line. But she had a president who was a little jealous of me, because I knew how to get her support. He convinced her that it was a very bad idea because it was too great an investment risk. I had already organized everything with the people who were going to produce the designs, and then at the last moment the project was dropped. So when I went to tell them, they asked me why didn't I come to work with them. They said they weren't interested in working for Arden, they wanted to work with me."

That was how, in 1965, de la Renta came to work with Jane Derby, Ltd., in New York, designing the ready-to-wear fashions for which he has become famous.