“There are no ladies who lunch,” says Fernando Garcia, one half of the creative duo behind Oscar de la Renta and Monse. “Everybody’s too busy to do that. They just go to Pret,” he said, referring to the takeout restaurant Pret-a-Manger. “The world evolves. Oscar always told us to evolve with it.”
Over the last five months, Garcia and his co-designer, Laura Kim, have thought a lot about what Oscar de la Renta would say. They were appointed co-creative directors of the brand in September, following the departure of Peter Copping, who de la Renta and his son-in-law Alex Bolen, the brand’s C.E.O., had hired to replace the designer, who died in 2014. (Copping stayed with the brand for less than two years before leaving last summer.) When Kim and Garcia were hired at the brand, it was something of a homecoming: Kim had worked with de la Renta from 2003 until 2015, most recently serving as the design director, and Garcia had been a senior designer with the company.
In the interim, they co-founded their own brand, Monse, which they launched in May 2015. Their first collection featured deconstructed white shirting, which has become something of a design signature. “We take a fabric that everyone is comfortable with — and we just unhinge it,” Garcia says. “If any of our clients look like they are getting dressed for more than five minutes, we failed at doing our job.” Since then, Monse’s relaxed designs have been well received by both buyers and critics. Last year, they were nominated for a CFDA Swarovski award in the women’s wear category.
The question of effort is an interesting one for the designers, who are trying to balance a brand built upon the idea of effortlessness with the legacy of Oscar de la Renta, which has traditionally represented the kind of woman who cares a great deal. But Garcia and Kim don’t see those two philosophies — or the brands themselves — as being at odds. “The thing is that in general if the design looks contrived, the woman looks contrived,” Garcia says. The pair considered this heavily in designing their debut Oscar de la Renta collection, for fall/winter 2017. “There is evening and there are corsets in the Oscar show, but the shape is so basic and simple that she will not come across as someone who is constipated,” Garcia adds.
In fact, to underscore how harmoniously the two brands can coexist, Kim and Garcia opted to show the fall/winter collections for both brands together, one after another, during New York Fashion Week last week. This presented some logistical juggling — punctuated by lots of shuttling between Oscar de la Renta’s expansive midtown studio and their more cramped Monse quarters on lower Broadway. “It’s fun, it’s like we have two movies that we have to play, and a different role in each one,” Garcia says. “It’s like you are bringing a character to life, and it’s very different in each. In Oscar she’s a tough flower. And at Monse, she just doesn’t care as much.”
When they set out to create their first collection for Oscar, Kim and Garcia drew heavily from the house’s archives — mining inspiration from old prints, colors and silhouettes. “I went back to the collections that I died for when I was interning for him and remembered why I loved it the first second I laid eyes on it, and I remembered why Oscar loved it too,” Garcia says. “He was always a really big fan of modern but very simple — with luxe fabrics. That was sort of the beginning of the inspiration.” Kim and Garcia began by thinking about the looks in the collection as belonging to different groups, organized around certain themes — there were velvets, metallics, dresses that experimented with volume — and gave each their own mood board, scattered with pattern samples and archival inspiration pictures. Elsewhere in the collection, they introduced entirely new silhouettes: The pants of a ladylike black suit, for example, hang with just a little bit of a slouch. “There’s definitely a little bit more of a sportiness in it,” Kim says of their Oscar collection. “Everything’s super stretchy. Even if it looks structured, there’s a comfort level to it."
Comfort, sure, but their vision for Oscar is still one of extreme luxury: There are ankle-grazing evening gowns, shimmering cocktail dresses and intarsia fox furs. The designers acknowledged that the nature of dressing up — and the act of primping for galas — has changed. But, they insist, that doesn’t mean that eveningwear, or the ball gown, is dead. “You can reinvent it,” Garcia says. “You can make it exciting again. That’s the challenge. Here, we are definitely trying to make sure there’s a fresh take on it. Because Oscar would have definitely wanted to have us try.”
Source: www.nytimes.com