Oscar de la Renta

Oscar Aristides Ortiz de la Renta Fiallo was born in 1932, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic ans died in 2014, Kent, Connecticut, United States. He is a fashion designer whose work, fusing European luxury with American ease, helped define standards of elegant dressing among socialites, first ladies of the United States, and red-carpet celebrities over a 50-year career.

De la Renta was educated in the fashion industry all around the world. He moved to Madrid to study painting at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts when he was 18 years old. He began working as an illustrator for fashion firms there, eventually rising to the position of assisting Cristóbal Balenciaga, Spain's most famous designer. After working as an assistant to Lanvin-head Castillo's designer, Antonio del Castillo, in Paris in 1961, de la Renta moved to New York City in 1963 to design the couture and ready-to-wear collections for Elizabeth Arden. In 1965, he founded his own firm in New York, which he named after himself.

De la Renta's label immediately became synonymous with casual luxury among the society women he effortlessly dispersed, many of whom were friends of his then-wife, Françoise de Langlade, editor of French Vogue. He rose to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a result of his gypsy and Russian-inspired collections, which foreshadowed the international refinement that would characterize his subsequent work. These designs were always contemporary, but they also had a romantic, feminine quality to them, owing to his background in both American sportswear and European couture.