On the Town
Blue spells green at Oscar de la Renta lakeside show.
Blue, green and brown reigned at the League to Save Lake Tahoe’s 48th fashion show fundraiser on Aug. 5, and not because they were seen on models parading the Oscar de la Renta Resort 2018 collection on a runway along the shore.
Blue was for the alpine waters, once pristine and growing warmer and murkier with algae thanks to drought and climate change. “It would kill me for the lake to be green one day,” said Allyson Willoughby, a league board member raised at Incline Village, Nev., on Tahoe’s north shore. “I worry about that a lot.”
Green was for greenbacks — a record $1.1 million was raised — as well as the mental image of the late Dolph Andrews Jr. in an accountant’s green eyeshade calculating the proceeds. Andrews, who died in January, helped organize the first benefit show in 1969 with Saks Fifth Avenue and designer Bill Blass at Rubicon Beach. At the private estate in Incline Village where it’s now held, guests walking down a driveway with pines, waterfalls, ponds and floral gardens were treated to a half-dozen photos of Andrews set up on easels — a visual tribute.
“I could set my watch to January and a call from Dolph. He’d say, ‘Can we count on you?’ ” Alex Bolen, chief executive officer of Oscar de la Renta, told the crowd. “It was not really a question.”
And brown? That’s for the creature that Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia — the new creative directors at Oscar de la Renta — ran into at 6:30 a.m. that day. Setting out for a hike near Brockway Point, the New Yorkers were startled by “a big brown bear galloping across the street,” said Garcia. “We bolted backwards and waited it out.”
The event, with modest beginnings as a lakeside picnic, is now an upscale affair. Some 650 people paying $500 apiece were treated to a string quartet, a jazz band, a catered lunch under tents with chandeliers, a runway show and a silent and live auction.
Event co-chairs Heidi Cary, Edith Tobin, Barbara Brown, Jessica Hickingbotham and Krista Giovara worked hard to bring new faces into the fold.
Social scene regulars — philanthropist Dede Wilsey, plastic surgeon Dr. Carolyn Chang, entrepreneur Komal Shah and attorney Karen Kubin among them — were joined by guests whose names are not typically seen in boldface type. They included professional model Tyler Clinton (former President Bill Clinton’s nephew); producer Jonny Wright of Los Angeles; Sarah Thayer, a former biopharmaceutical exec from Menlo Park; and Amy Sugarman, a producer for “On the Air With Ryan Seacrest” in Los Angeles. “The setting is unbelievable — when I was walking down that driveway alone, it blows your mind,” Sugarman said. “This is quite extraordinary.”
Extraordinary also applied to Cary and her family, who auctioned off the antique motorboat owned by her late mother, philanthropist Diana Dollar Knowles. The 1931 Gar Wood triple cockpit runabout, the “Tamarack,” sold for $200,000 to a private bidder who promised to keep it on the lake.
Diane Zack and Varda Rabin of Marin paid $50,000 for a New York Fashion Week package with frontrow seats at the Oscar show in February. Rabin began bringing her children to Tahoe 40 years ago. “When life is so busy and hard for people, I feel I gave them the best way to erase the tension,” Rabin said. “The highlight is camping; they love the woods. So hurray for Lake Tahoe and what it did for my kids. I’m willing to support it.”