Coming back home to Oscar de la Renta
When Oscar de la Renta died, in October 2014, the fashion world was shaken, nowhere more strongly than at de la Renta’s West 42nd Street atelier. His was a family company — his son-in-law, Alex Bolen, is its chief executive — and many long-serving employees felt like family, too. Laura Kim, his design director, had worked with de la Renta for more than a decade; Fernando Garcia, a young design assistant and de facto celebrity wrangler (as well as Kim’s fiancé at the time), had done so since 2009. De la Renta was a mentor and, in many ways, a father figure to them. But grief quickly gave way to pragmatism: The house’s pre-fall 2015 collection had to be presented to retailers and the press just six weeks later.
“Alex called me and told me, ‘You’ve got to keep it together,’” Kim said. “Fernando cried for a month. He wasn’t the boss at the time. He had the luxury to.”
The collection was shown as scheduled, with Bolen insisting that Kim take over de la Renta’s customary role, meeting with attendees and explaining the collection. She inched out, goggle-eyed and terrified, to face the crowd.
She need not have been. The collection, an homage to de la Renta with a finale of “big ball gowns, like he likes them,” was well received and would go on to yield the house’s most commercially successful season in years. It was also the last one Kim designed for the de la Renta label.
About two months earlier, Bolen and de la Renta hired seasoned British designer Peter Copping, then the artistic director of Nina Ricci, to succeed the legendary designer. Kim, who had been at de la Renta’s side since 2003, had hoped for the job but was passed over. She promised de la Renta to stay until Copping arrived but announced her decision to leave afterward.
De la Renta had hoped to work alongside Copping for months, to ease the transition. But Copping’s first day wound up being that of de la Renta’s funeral. His appointment was greeted enthusiastically by the press, but his collections, the first of which he showed the following February, were tepidly received.
Meanwhile, Kim and Garcia seized the moment and went out on their own. They founded Monse (Mon-SAY), named for Garcia’s mother, Monserrat, with investments from both parents and a friend of the Garcia family. Their first collection had some of the cocktail flirtiness for which de la Renta’s collections were known but with a wilder, trickier bent.
It was an immediate hit, first with celebrities, whose stylists Garcia knew from his days at Oscar. Even before their first show, Sarah Jessica Parker, an Oscar aficionado, was photographed in a Monse dress (“Our audience doubled that day,” Garcia said); so was Amal Clooney, who had been married in an Oscar de la Renta gown.
Soon their clothes were being worn by Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, Kerry Washington, Jessica Chastain and Lupita Nyong’o, on talk shows and arena stages, at parties and premieres. Parker collaborated with Monse on a custom outfit inspired by the musical “Hamilton” for the Met Gala. After Brie Larson won the Academy Award for best actress this year, she turned up at Vanity Fair’s Oscar party in a pink velvet column by Monse, statuette in hand.
The press recorded every instance, and the industry began paying attention. Major department stores fought for the exclusive right to buy the first collection. The Council of Fashion Designers of America, the organizing body of U.S. fashion, nominated Monse for its up-and-comers award; so did the Woolmark Co., which sponsors
an international design prize.
A few months on, Carolina Herrera hired the two designers as consultants for several collections. “The eye and the talent and the energy: I think they’ve got the whole package,” she said. (They are no longer working with her company, which abruptly announced the appointment of a new designer, Raffaele Ilardo, last week.) Investors circled.
In less than a year, they were the hottest new design team in town. You can guess what happened next.
In July, after less than two years at the company, Copping was dismissed from Oscar de la Renta, and a search for a new successor brought Bolen quickly back to the designers he had initially passed over.
Kim and Garcia are to be the next creative directors at Oscar de la Renta, and their first collection will be shown in February. They will continue to design Monse collections and divide their time between the two brands.
“I screwed that one up, in retrospect,” Bolen said in an interview at the Monse studio. “I wish Laura had come in and pounded the table and said, ‘I want the job.’ We discussed it. But I didn’t push it enough, and I should have.”
Bolen declined to discuss the brief tenure of Copping or the reasons for his departure, saying only, “Fashion businesses work best when the creative team and the business team speak the same language.” (Copping declined to comment.)
“With Laura and Fernando, we are family,” Bolen said. “In some incredibly important way, we’re all the students — as a professional matter, the children — of Oscar.”
The announcement that Kim and Garcia would be returning, in triumph, to Oscar de la Renta, came just before New York Fashion Week, as they and their team organized and agonized over Monse’s spring 2017 show
Garcia had just returned from India with heavily sequined fabrics to be stitched into evening dresses. Kim was knocking together extra pairs of pants as needed. The collection — part Wall Street menswear, part regatta-striped frippery, part topsy-turvy varsity sweaters — was taking eclectic shape.
Kim and Garcia’s yearlong breakneck journey — from behindthe-scenes talents to startup hopefuls to celebrity favorites to creative directors of the house where they began as interns — is unusual even in the speed-cycling world of fashion.
With three seasons under their belt, they have outgrown their offices twice. They moved from Garcia’s apartment to a small studio and then, as of July, to a large Tribeca loft where Kim’s mother installs herself before each show to cook Korean food and help with the hand stitching.
At a giant wooden table in the center of the room, Garcia sketches dresses on individual cards, which are then colored or glittered, bordered in heavy black like a comic strip and tacked on the walls. At a nearby table (or, on occasion, on the floor), Kim cuts rough patterns by hand.
“They’ve done so much more than so many new designers,” said Sarah Rutson, the vice president for global buying for Net-a-Porter, who agreed to meet with the designers after they cold-messaged her on LinkedIn even before they started the line. “I’ve worked with many designers, and it’s taken them seven or eight seasons to get to where they are.”
The designers’ precise plans for Oscar de la Renta are still to be decided. They have a Monse show to attend to first, on Sept. 9. After a groundswell of buzz and rumor, their RSVPs have swelled, and they are scrambling to replace their original venue with a new one large enough to accommodate the guests.Kim said it was too soon to begin discussing their vision for Oscar de la Renta but acknowledged her former boss was very much on here mind.
“I always remember Oscar wanting the newest thing,” she said. “I think he wanted us to move forward but keep it very Oscar. He was the one pushing us, to see the newest, youngest ideas and materials.”