Fashion 88 : One Personal Appearance That Deserves an Oscar
In bungalow No. 4 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Oscar de la Renta’s suite, you’ll find a half-eaten banana on one table, a Louis Vuitton tote bag on another and a floral arrangement on another. The all-white flowers--some tulips, some narcissuses--are chopped off at different heights and arranged starkly in a flat dish.
“That’s one of the ugliest flower arrangements I’ve ever seen,” remarks the designer. “I think someone should make a book of hotel flower arrangements and see who does the ugliest.”
He certainly does get right to the point.
Name Has Swirl
But when it comes to matters of taste, who better than Oscar de la Renta to pass judgment? The name alone, a writer once pointed out, has swirl. The Latin accent, redolent of his Santa Domingo origins, could belong to an opera star. The house-hopping life style (he owns three homes) compares to that of potentates. And, of course, the eye of discrimination has catapulted him to the top of the Seventh Avenue fashion establishment, where he unquestionably reigns as one of the premiere New York designers.
But now, having been awakened from a nap, De la Renta pads shoe-less to the front door. He’s wearing trousers and a white cotton shirt bearing his monogram, in red, just beneath his heart.
‘Like My Soul’
He excuses himself to put on his shoes and the jacket of his custom-made suit, which, he points out melodramatically, is dark gray, “like my soul.”
Here to promote his namesake perfume, De la Renta is not his usual, glittering, glamour-boy self.
Just last week he was dressing one of his rich and social customers, Mercedes Kellogg, in silver satin, for a party at the Metropolitan Museum in New York preceding her marriage to Texas oilman Sid Bass.
But now he looks sleepy. He pops a few grapes in his mouth. He coughs. Admittedly, he’s weary from spritzing customers with his fragrance for most of the afternoon at Bullock’s South Coast Plaza, and then spending the remainder of the day on the 405 freeway back to his hotel. (His two dinners at Spago over the weekend may have worn him out too.)
Bought Sweat Pants
What he would really like to do right now, in fact, is go and buy a pair of sweat pants for the redeye flight back to New York. Wait a minute. Sweat pants? He nods. Even Oscar de la Renta has, you know, inelegant moments. In fact, he already owns “two or three” pairs of sweats. For tennis.
But back to the glamorous side. Isn’t that all people care about? Isn’t it the image that sells perfumes and keeps his a staple on the list of Top 10 sellers?
“I really don’t know,” he says. “It works and it doesn’t work. You get put in a certain pattern. That (the parties, the hobnobbing) isn’t all I do. People think I spend every night out.”
He also has a serious side, displayed in the sole support he provides for a children’s home, Casa de Ninos, in Santo Domingo, and now in the chairing of a fund-raising effort to build a children’s hospital there.
The only reason his perfume sells, De la Renta maintains, is “because it is a very good fragrance. Obviously at first, the name, the glamour of the name, the label help. But eventually it’s because people like the fragrance and come back and back and back.”
De la Renta retreats to his room.
