Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour and fashion designer Oscar de la Renta mingle at the opening of the Oscar de la Renta American Icon exhibit at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Ark.
Iconic fashion designer Oscar de la Renta is dead at 82. The cause of death wasn’t immediately clear.
“We will always remember him as the man who made women look and feel beautiful,” former first lady Laura Bush said late Monday.
De la Renta was in Little Rock last year as the Clinton Presidential Library opened an exhibit of his work. Arkansas Business’ sister publication, Little Rock Soirée, has coverage of that event here and here, as well as news of his death here.
Also today, the Clintons, including Chelsea’s husband Marc Mezvinsky, have released a statement:
We are deeply saddened by the passing of our dear friend, Oscar de la Renta. His singular talent and exquisite taste elevated American fashion, and his warmth and friendship will be missed by our family and all whose lives he touched in his extraordinary journey.Oscar’s remarkable eye was matched only by his generous heart. His legacy of philanthropy extended from children in his home country who now have access to education and healthcare, to some of New York’s finest artists whose creativity has been sustained through his support.We will always be grateful to Oscar for the love he showed us, and for sharing his talent on some of the most important occasions of our lives. And we will never forget the joy, adventure, and beauty we shared with Oscar, his beloved wife, Annette, and their family during our many happy times together, especially those spent in his beloved Dominican Republic.We join his family and many friends and admirers all over the world in mourning his loss, while also celebrating his beautiful and joyous life.
Also: Vogue Editor Anna Wintour remembers de la Renta here.
And: Arkansas Business political columnist Blake Rutherford, writing for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2013, had these thoughts on de la Renta, Hillary Clinton and first lady fashion. He specifically recalls Hillary Clinton’s 1998 Vogue cover:
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 …
You can read Rutherford’s full column on the Democrat-Gazette’s website here (paywall).
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