Monday, September 2, 2013

Oscar de la Renta for Gotham Magazine September 2013




On Hillary Clinton calling him an "icon": "I am not an icon; that was Hillary’s idea. I love Hillary. She’s extraordinary, a symbol of where women want to go. I assume we will have a woman president soon."

On always moving forward: "The most important thing about fashion is to have the memory of a mosquito. Don’t ever look back; always look forward. You are as good as your last collection."
  
On how the consumer changed over the course of his career: "We have a very different woman today. When I first came to New York, a woman wearing pants would not be allowed into a restaurant. And a lot of the time, especially in my case, doing pricey clothes, the husband was paying for them. Today, women have the power to make their own decisions. Obviously that makes our job far more difficult because we are dealing with a consumer who knows much more about herself. She doesn’t really care so much about whose dress she will wear; she cares about how she identifies with that dress, how that dress represents [how] she feels on a particular day. You’re expressing your own identity, not the identity of whoever created that dress. That’s what we are trying to accomplish."

"Here’s how I explain the differences between women then and now: In the past a woman would see a dress that came in pink and red. She’d prefer the red but remember her husband loves her in pink. Then she’d buy the pink dress. Today she’d buy the red."

On the influential women in his life:  "I’m the youngest in a family with six sisters. My family was in the insurance business, and as the only boy, I felt that eventually I would work in that business. But I never saw myself selling insurance. I had an extraordinary mother who was always very supportive. Because of her, I was able to go to art school in the Dominican Republic. I was 15 or 16 at the time, five or six years younger than everyone else in my class. And in my second or third month at school, we had to draw…."

On how he'd describe himself: "I always say this: live, love, and laugh. A huge mistake we make is forgetting that one day we will die. We think that we are going to live forever. I always say life is a little like a garden. There is a time to plant, then a time you have to weed. Just think about people you’ve deeply cared for. And then think of the people you wish you’d spent more time with. Or about the things you had loved and [whether] you’d given [enough] time to them."

On being described by others as "a graceful, elegant, warm, positive and loving person": For me it’s so much easier to love than to hate. It’s funny because I think of my friend Julio Iglesias, who sang a certain song about love in 1973 and stopped. And I said, Julio, why don’t you sing that song? He just started to sing it again. It’s a wonderful song because it says there are people to whom love never happens and there are people to whom by the time it happens, they have somebody already in that place. To experience love is a wonderful thing."






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