ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories: Oscar de la Renta

Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Oscar de la Renta Spring/Summer 2013 Ad-Campaign

“What’s the mood?” queried Oscar de la Renta backstage at his show, and laughed “trying to make beautiful clothes!”

Discover the Oscar de la Renta Spring 2013 runway show at the end of this post!

LoL, Andrea

Oscar, of course, is not a designer who frets about arcane inspiration or agonizes over capturing the zeitgeist in cloth; he just makes beautiful clothes, beautifully, to make his pan-generational clients look and feel as good as they can. And that is no small feat.

This doesn’t mean that he didn’t hit the key trends of the season: the new mid-calf-length skirt, for instance, and some of the most ravishing lace pieces we’ve seen, including examples in thick cotton, tape-work, and an imaginative re-embroidery of dark ribbons in an abstract scribble motif. Amongst the airy ball gowns and sleek evening sheath dresses he showed a playful quartet of brilliant faille evening shorts one with an ostrich-fronded peplum, another with a slash-neck top crusted with bright colored, shiny-petalled plastic gardenias.

True to his roots, this famed son of the Dominican Republic threw some Caribbean seasoning into the mix, with an upbeat palette of watermelon pink, sunshine yellow, and parrot green. These solids were mixed with vibrant Madras cotton plaids, slashed to ribbons to create multitiered pencil skirts.

Only Oscar can fashion the grandest evening statements and still make them seem featherlight and effortless to wear. There were stately solid-colored faille gowns with a Cristóbal Balenciaga flavor, dangling with the pampilles little baubles wrapped in silk thread of a toreador’s suit of lights, and silvery sheath dresses, including one pleated example that had a Fortuny (the designer who will be the centerpiece of an upcoming exhibition at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute of which Oscar is Chairman) spirit to it.

And the finale of peacock-skirted ball gowns (high in front, sweeping to a wide train in back), bristling with pleated tulle or dusted with fragile embroidery, proved a master class in Oscar’s superb couture techniques, honed through the decades since his first adventures in fashion in the 1950s.

"An Illustration can capture the essence of a dress. What is left out is as important as what is drawn." - Oscar de la Renta

Illustration by Jessica Repetto for Oscar de la Renta.
Discover more of here brilliant work here.

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© Oscar de la Renta / VOGUE / TOM FORD by © ANDREA JANKE

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Friday, 8 June 2012

Resort 2013 Collection | Oscar de la Renta

“Making clothes.” That was Oscar de la Renta’s response when asked what he was thinking about for resort 2013. It wasn’t, admittedly, the most incisive or penetrating or okay, go on, say it, I won’t mind original question to pose moments after a show. Yet de la Renta’s nifty, no-nonsense reply, delivered with a warm chuckle, pretty much encapsulates what was going on here. This was quite simply a collection about clothes. Lots of clothes. Better still, lots of really good clothes. De la Renta offered softer, gentler, and more relaxed variations on what we’ve come to know over the years as the Oscar archetypes: the little skirt suit made up of a just-slip-it-on cardigan jacket and lean skirt, the frothy cocktail dress that fizzes and foams to the knees, the decorative sweater with a swish of an evening skirt, and the columnar dress whose big-night presence is in inverse proportion to the narrowness of its silhouette.

But the real sense of ease couldn’t be measured by the lack of an intense, clear color palette (carnation, iris, vermilion, peridot, evergreen, and a shade of cobalt blue dubbed “Pacific”), or exuberant prints (gardenias, parrot tulips), or elaborate handwork (glinting embroideries abounded), because all of these were in very much in evidence here. Where it got light and breezy and uplifting was with de la Renta’s use of humble, homespun cotton as the collection’s material of choice, even if it came as a richly worked guipure lace or scattered with thousands upon thousands of sequins. The cotton somehow conspired to add a crisp unfussiness to everything. Even gingham, that most prosaic of patterns, got a look in this collection and it was taken to hitherto unattained levels of sophistication. Suddenly, it’s the fabric of our (very chic) lives.

Perhaps de la Renta is on to something with all this: Fall is set to bring fashion into full-on freak-chic mode, so there is something to be said for creating clothes that are unpretentious yet beautifully rendered. That thought certainly came to de la Renta’s head when he was at the Costume Institute Gala recently, dodging the dresses that had epically long trains trailing in their wake. “Some of them seemed to be 20 feet long!” he said, laughing. “Enough, really.” And, like all intelligent, forward-thinking designers, he has a solution: narrow pants in vibrant prints, to be worn with a jet-encrusted mule resting on a low block heel. Precious and practical.