Lounge Wear Helps Keep Romance Alive
Oscar de la Renta owns six pairs of silk pajamas but never wears anything to bed.
“The pajamas are to take to other people’s houses, if I’m invited for the weekend,” he said.
In the tearoom of Bullocks Wilshire, before attending a show of his designs, De la Renta munched lemon wedges from a cup filled with hot water.
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He had love and marriage on his mind, along with his newest lounge-wear collection, which was about to be modeled on a runway in a restaurant where women still wear white gloves to lunch.
“To preserve a marriage, keep the flames alive,” he suggested. “True love ends when one thinks it has ended. Instead of letting boredom and laziness become part of marriage, it’s so much better to build on the first attraction you felt. That’s part of why to wear lounge wear.”
After the first couple of years of marriage, dressing up for dinner at home without guests is what De la Renta described as “the discipline of life at home.” He showed silk-print caftans and satin skirts with Angora sweaters as well as jump suits with jewels on the shoulders.
Coco --Across town at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, French fashion model Ines de la Fressange, who appears in the Chanel ads and the Chanel shows in Paris, poured spoonfuls of sugar into her cream-colored tea and ate chocolate-chip cookies for breakfast. She was in town to encourage Chanel boutique shoppers to buy the newest house perfume, Coco, which she sometimes wears herself because “I just happen to like it,” she says.
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“I don’t think men prefer women to be too bright,” she mentioned. “If a woman is really bright, she doesn’t let it show.” But De la Fressange says she finds that women prefer men, like tea, to be weak. “Hypochondriacs, the Woody Allen types.”
She also talked about fashion. With two of the seven years in her contract now spent, Fressange says she owns several closetfuls of Chanel clothes, mainly suits, navy blue sweaters and white blouses, as well as a purple coat from the couture collection.
Of the Chanel boutique in Paris, where she lives, Fressange says: “If I want something new, I go to the boutique and take it. If I’m going to a dinner, I choose a new sweater. If I go through the boutique and see a new bag, I take it. But I don’t take a lot. I’m very anguished to have a lot of clothes I don’t like.”
