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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Merrily They Dress

By ERIC WILSON
Published: November 19, 2008

CHINS up, people. Hem lengths, too.

Here we are at the outset of what is shaping up to be a six-week season of grinchiness. Holiday festivities, we are told, are being downsized and will amount to little more than a plate of cold cuts with a lump of coal as the centerpiece. This year B.Y.O.B. means bring your own bonus.

So we can choose to dress in a manner appropriately morose for the times and prove the timeworn adage that hems fall with the stock market. Or we can throw caution to the wind, as John Galliano did on Monday night, when he arrived at a party wearing the traditional button-covered costume of a Pearly King (the neighborhood monarch who protected the local street vendors of Victorian London). The mother-of-pearl buttons on his suit formed a pattern of vines, and his top hat was trimmed with rings of fresh daisies. The room was hotter than an orchid house.

“I hope I don’t wilt,” Mr. Galliano said.

The party was given by the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Vogue to alleviate the pain of cash-starved young designers with financial prizes and mentoring. The CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund was created five years ago, something like a Troubled Asset Relief Program for regular folk like Proenza Schouler and Phillip Lim. But seeing as Condé Nast, like many companies, has canceled its customary Christmas events this year, the occasion also served as a de facto holiday party.

The dress code on the invitation said “Dress Up,” but practically no one took that as a reason to wear black. Rather they seemed to take it as a challenge to dress in a spirit that could be described as Up With Fashion. Despite the presence of a few crabby-looking retailers who were not feeling very U.W.F., the party swarmed with famous models wearing the shortest of skirts and socialites clinging to their decadent dresses. All in all, the crowd reflected the upbeat and offhand style that seems to define the look of the season.

At the very least, they showed that hem lengths have not fallen just yet.

“I actually feel very bright and optimistic,” said Dr. Lisa Airan, the Manhattan dermatologist, who was wearing a snow-white silk Lanvin dress with feathered frippery around the bodice, white leather biker gloves from Rodarte and hot pink pumps by Giambattista Valli.

Mr. Valli happened to be standing nearby, wearing a pearl necklace. Which is to say that the mood was far from funereal.

“Now that we have a new president and we’re moving forward,” Dr. Airan said, “I think that maybe we’ve gone through the worst of it.”

As Alexander Wang, the designer who won the CFDA/Vogue prize this year, said in Harper’s Bazaar, the old rules of dressing appropriately for holiday parties no longer apply. No daytime rules or nighttime formality. Shorts can work if they have style.

That may sound like a flippant approach to the subject of party dressing, given the serious troubles facing the nation and the economy at this moment, reflected in the devastating sales numbers coming from retailers since September. But dressing up can still have an emotionally uplifting effect, even if most people are doing their shopping in their own closets.

Erin Fetherston, another designer, had considered wearing black to the party, but changed her mind and wore a floral print dress that was bold enough to have come from Murano. “I’m feeling more polished all of a sudden,” she said.

Last year, as gas prices skyrocketed and home values declined, it was actually short and skin-tight dresses that were selling. As the economy worsened, fashion moved in still stranger and less expected directions, toward bondage references, for example, but also harem pants, jumpsuits, prep school and polish, all at the same time. The result, coming out at night this holiday season, is evening wear that looks like a mash-up of “Mad Men” and “Gossip Girl.”

“Everyone’s so glum right now that it’s really time to bring out the glad rags,” said the designer Sue Stemp. “I love a great-fitting cocktail dress to lift the mood, and now is the perfect time.”

Perhaps that is wishful thinking. Robert Burke, a former fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman who is now a luxury consultant, reported that women are buying “nothing too loud, nothing that screams fashion.” Elie Tahari said that taffeta gowns and extravagant looks are going to be less popular than something that can be worn beyond the season, like skirts and jackets that can be layered and gussied up with a piece of jewelry.

“Women want to dress up and make themselves feel good,” he said, “but they don’t want to spend a lot of money.”

At the same time, it has not gone unnoticed that the Obama family is setting a U.W.F. example for America that is lifting designers’ spirits. Ever since the Obamas appeared on election night as a coordinated fashion tableau, as if they had just stepped out of a holiday greeting card portrait, sales of red dresses have been terrific, said Kay Unger, who makes party frocks.

Customers are being more inventive, she added, by buying short-sleeve jackets that can be worn over a dress or with long gloves, then wearing the same jacket with jeans for an office look.

“The people who are not affected by this economy are the young people who didn’t have an I.R.A. or money invested in the stock market, so they are seeing things in a different way,” Ms. Unger said. “They’re buying things just for going out. And they are mostly buying short dresses, in 99 percent of the cases, because they are really fun and they can go a lot of places.”

Also, you can still see their cute shoes.

For those women who are shopping with value and versatility in mind, the Little Black Dress remains a popular choice, but, Ms. Unger said, there is just as much interest in flashier metallic fabrics like bronze or brushed gold, which have a more limited shelf life. Similarly, Nicole Miller cited gold and silver fabrics as the look of the season, “because it makes everyone look 10 pounds thinner,” she said.

Seriously? “The texture makes things look camouflaged, unlike a really flat fabric,” she said.

And if you’re on a budget, you can always improvise with gift wrap.

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