CRITICAL SHOPPER | OSCAR DE LA RENTA

By CINTRA WILSON
Published: November 18, 2008

BOTH the weather without and the weather within were clammy and bleak on the sniveling afternoon I visited the Oscar de La Renta boutique. But Elegance must always win in the cage match against Despair, and therefore one must drag oneself out of the customary fetal position and subway uptown to investigate luxurious clothing, however unaffordable.

Mark M. Gong for The New York Times
My own prejudices gave me a blind spot in regard to Oscar de la Renta. In my mind, he was one of those gilded old luxury designers like Valentino, worn exclusively by women so morbidly wealthy that they can wear white satin on the soles of their shoes since their daily walk involves only the floor mats of bulletproof limousines, Hereke silk carpets and the soft, clean heads of the middle class.

Anyone who ends up as a primary couture source for first ladies (e.g., Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush) arouses vast suspicion in my mind. I get dumb and belligerent about designers at nosebleed heights of price and unobtainability. Keep your septuagenarian prom tutus, I think. I’m a downtown girl. I’ll check out de la Renta the day Dita Von Tease is first lady.

I was forced to abandon this craven and faulty reasoning within about five minutes of stepping inside the boutique. I felt as if I wasn’t in a clothing store so much as a kind of museum-cum-petting zoo, where ordinary people are miraculously allowed to walk straight up to the racks and fondle hugely expensive and beautiful garments without even having to remove their shoes and belt, wait through a security line, surrender electronic devices or endure a 200-kilovolt warning Taser.

Mr. de la Renta, at 76, seems to be at that point in his career when, like Kurosawa or Fellini, he has been a master of his craft for so long that he owns a golden mean that consistently delivers symmetry, proportion and harmony and is therefore at liberty to ditch all constraints and break any rules he doesn’t feel like obeying. His framework is so refined that he can waltz through the vast closet of his long and colorful career and mash up design inspirations from his own vocabulary, to express any whacked-out impulse that shakes loose in his imagination. These are the fruits of a mature artistry; this is also the kind of blissfully relaxed creativity that emanates from a guy who knows he doesn’t have to play ball anymore, because he pretty much owns the ball and could probably buy the ball factory if he felt like it.


From the first rack, I was clutching insanely craft-saturated sleeves and staring into them as if they were kaleidoscopes, wondering, “How many nuns went blind?” Layers upon layers of meticulous, eye-crossing detail, created a mesmerizing depth of texture. There is so much going on: whole landscapes and leitmotifs wrought in black beads; hand-stitched quilting detail suggesting years of indentured servitude to the Tang dynasty; drapes and pin tucks of such alien perfection and accuracy they looked as if they were built by the Pixie Corps of Engineers.

I stared agog at a leather trench coat ($10,450) that was swirling with leather piping coiled in leafy, paisleylike shapes resembling muscle striations, so bewilderingly intricate I had an Aha! moment: Clothing this advanced could guarantee a lady the center of attention in most rooms, even if she lacked charm, looks and substance. It is the haberdashery equivalent of a Maserati. People are likely to be a bit hypnotized, no matter how unspectacular the driver may be.

I was really impressed by a standard piece one sees at charity functions for the square and elderly: a sequined, Republican banquet-wife bolero jacket. I usually find them ghastly, but Oscar de la Renta’s had soul: layered stacks of black and blood-red sequins, fused with cross-hatched black and red stitching into a compellingly rich pattern somewhat dizzying in its artistry. It was entirely counterintuitive, but this Nancy Reagan garment looked downright hardcore: primitive, even a little brutal.

This much-needed boost of savagery on a piece of ladies’ formalwear seemed very open-minded. I thought it would be like showing up with a shrunken head on your tuxedo in lieu of a boutonniere. You know you’ve got at least one conversation starter.

The favorite thing I tried on was an olive sharkskin party dress ($3,290). It fit in a zero-gravity, birthday-princess way you dream of when you are a girl-child of about 8. The skirt flared perfectly around the waist atop a weightless infrastructure of silk petticoats. It was like stepping in and out of a giant peony. Even more beguiling was its versatility — it was a dress you could wear to an illegal drag race, dinner with Henry Kissinger and a gay cruise-ship wedding, all in the same night.

There are light years of difference between serious designer clothing and the stuff we buy in malls, hence the vast differences in affordability. It’s the same gulf that resides between mayonnaisey hotel paintings that chimps could be trained to create with a spatula, and the stuff in the permanent collection at the Met. If you squint really hard, the high-end stuff and low-end stuff can look fairly similar, but the fundamental difference is in the artistic energy invested in the garment or the painting itself. Bad art won’t revive your soul.

I was in a vile mood when I walked into Oscar de la Renta, but hanging out in that little oasis was intoxicating enough to boost my spirit. There is such thought, feeling and desire to create beauty in these garments you can practically taste it.

You don’t have to own monstrously beautiful, prohibitively expensive Oscar de la Renta garments any more than you need to own a genuine Kandinsky. But your life can generally be improved just by knowing such gorgeous stuff exists. That Keats guy said it: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

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