Oscar de la Renta was in Little Rock for the first time July 8. He came here to support a retrospective of his work, “Oscar de la Renta: American Icon,” at the Clinton Presidential Center. Alongside was Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue and arguably the most influential person in the high-fashion world.
Fifty years ago, Mr. de la Renta came to America. When he was 18 he left his home country of the Dominican Republic for Spain to study painting. His creative vitality led him to fashion, an apprenticeship with renowned couturier Cristobal Balenciaga and a platform at Elizabeth Arden, until he launched his own label in 1965.
At an early age he found extraordinary success in the industry, and from there began to bridge the divide between fashion and American politics.
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The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 did much to shift the course of American politics. It also did much to shift the course of American taste,particularly in fashion design.
Today it makes sense: Jacqueline Kennedy is the iconoclast of first ladies. The label is justified because history has proven her right. But in 1961, when the Kennedys entered the White House, fashion was elitist. The decadence of European clothing was accessible only to the wealthy, or so it was believed.
Mrs. Kennedy understood it to be something more, which is why, on Mr. Kennedy’s inaugural trip to Paris, she paid homage through her clothing. It worked, and when they visited Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961, he slyly remarked: “I’d like to shake her hand first.”
The year marked the beginning of a decade of dramatic cultural shifts. Film, in addition to fashion, was profoundly influenced by French Nouvelle Vague and artists like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. The look became as important, if not more, than the story it told. Brigitte Bardot became an international icon; style became a form of substance.
During the same period, Vogue’s editor Diana Vreeland shifted the magazine’s focus to contemporary fashion and ushered in a new era in editorial content that made Vogue more accessible to cultural, business and political influencers.
Style as substance found a place in politics, too, primarily because of the Kennedys. Later, Nancy Reagan’s preference for red became a symbol of the Reagan administration. In 1998, the landscape shifted: Vogue decided to put Hillary Clinton on the cover, the first for a sitting first lady.
Ten years before, in 1988, Anna Wintour became editor-in-chief after a successful stint in the same position at British Vogue. She dressed a model in denim jeans for her first cover, a decision that “brokered a class-mass rapprochement that informs modern fashion to this day,” according to Caroline Weber in the New York Times.
In that same period, Mr. de la Renta continued to dress American first ladies.
On that Vogue cover, in a picture taken by Annie Leibovitz, Mrs. Clinton wore a dress by de la Renta. Susan Sontag, in an essay that appears in her collection On Photography, wrote, “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
This particular photograph is embedded in our political cognizance for what it said then and what it means now. It is not too much, I do not think, to suggest that this photograph exists as one of the most iconic of the 20th Century along with Matty Zimmerman’s picture of Marilyn Monroeover a New York subway vent in 1954, Neil Leifer’s ringside photo of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in 1965 and Joel Brodsky’s 1967 black-and-white of the Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison.
But the focus of this retrospective is Mr. de la Renta and the breadth of his artistry. Today, one might say that he’s better known for his red-carpet gowns worn by movie stars than those worn by former first ladies. No matter, it is a luxury that this exhibit, which displays both, is in Little Rock. One does not equate our city with high fashion.
Still, the presence of Wintour and de la Renta signifies the admiration they hold for the Clintons. It was mutual, as the president and Mrs. Clinton eloquently observed.
It was, however, their daughter Chelsea who articulated the evening’s most sincere point. She praised Mr. de la Renta for his “commitment to ensuring that fashion is not only beautiful but also accessible, not only something that an ingénue can wear, but something that any of us can take pleasure and pride in.”
On that broader idea of accessibility, it is suitable to mention our current first lady Michelle Obama, arguably the most fashion-forward of the modern era, who has embraced fashion as an aspect of her personal and political identity. To Mrs. Obama, it is important that people see her on the cover of the most important fashion magazine in the world wearing a dress by Jason Wu, whose clothes were, for a short time, on sale at Target.
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Blake Rutherford lives in Little Rock. He is vice president of The McLarty Companies and can be reached at rutherford.blake@gmail.com.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 07/13/2013