In the new Oscar de la Renta video, models Jordan Daniels, Mayowa Nichols, Taylor Hill, and Barbara Valente play office types by day and party girls by night. They wear gingham checks in apple green or hot pink at the copy machine and sequins and tinsel at the Top of the Standard. A call from Britney Spears—”it’s Britney, bitch”—signals the end of the work day.
The metamorphosis of this brand is complete, its target demo is now so solidly Millennial and Gen Z that the ladies who lunch who used to form the house base might not recognize it. That’s how brands evolve, of course. And after two years in various degrees of lockdown, cooped up kids and those who were recently kids are ready to let it all hang out. All week we’ve been hearing that party clothes are the big sellers of the moment. That goes for business at OdlR too. Since Billie Eilish wore Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim’s belle-of-the-ball gown to the Met Gala in September they’ve seen an uptick in younger customers.
Their starting point for fall, they said, was Florence, Italy, and their discovery that the model for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus was a married woman that Renaissance propriety forbade him from painting. “Oscar loved a society drama,” Garcia chuckled. The city’s many marble floored palazzi inspired a print that combined florals, seashells, inlaid tile work, and pearls spilling suggestively off their strand that appeared on pouf-sleeved backless dress and matching hooded cape.
Because the collection was in development in December, they crocheted echinacea flowers, which they were passing around in supplement form to friends with Covid, on a short shift dress. Bright colors were everywhere, on a leather coat, on velvet tailoring, on tinsel party wear. “They come to us for color,” Garcia said. “I’m allowed one black dress a season.” And the silhouette was mostly short. That’s partly down to who their clients are now and partly down to the state of the world; there are fewer galas than there were pre-pandemic, but Le Bain at the Standard is open for business.
