Street cred.

S: Forty years ago models in high fashion Suzy Parker, Dorian Leigh, Barbara Goalen were adults, women. Todays models are girls. What does that tell us about fashion?

OR: Among other things that the career of a model in those times was much longer. They could work way past forty. Today except for very successful faces a model is almost at the end of her career at thirty. The money has changed too. When I started working back in 1965, I could book a model for something like $50 an hour. Today, if you pay $5,000 an hour, you will be lucky. Great models like Suzy Parker made peanuts in comparison to today. A model like Linda Evangelista can make $10 to 12 million a year.

JS: But the youth of the models is reflected in the style of the clothes? Is that sensible?

OR: Fashion is indeed extremely youth oriented. The Sixties with the Beatles, Twiggy, flower children and all that changed the image of fashion and the fashion model forever. Now the biggest influence on fashion is what comes out of the street punk and all that. That is very different from when I started in 1965 and before that. In the Forties and the Fifties every woman wanted to dress like the movie stars. Then in the Sixties it was society women like Mrs. Paley. Now the models are the stars supermodels because they have become the arbiters of how women dress. Fashion is no longer something for the elites. On the contrary. Today you dont make your name by selling one dress to an extraordinary lady. You make your name and your money by selling to the masses.

JS: Will it stay that way? Or change back again?

OR: I dont think it will revert exactly. It will change but more subtly as the everyday woman becomes more secure about her role in the workplace. In the Seventies, when the Womens Lib movement was founded, women started to dress in a more aggressive manner for power the pants suit, etc. In the Nineties the working woman now knows that she doesnt have to dress like a man in order to make it in a "mans world. So we have seen a new approach, a softer way of dressing, after the excesses of the past two decades.

Right now Im launching this new fragrance thats called SO DE LA RENTA. It addresses the new woman who feels that her femininity is an asset, not a liability, in the workplace.

JS: So feminism has an influence on fashion today?

OR: Absolutely. Back in the Sixties, when I designed expensive clothes, my customer was a woman whose first occasion of the day was to put on a nice dress and have lunch with a friend. She bought expensive clothes that were paid for by her husband, and if her husband liked pink, she bought a pink dress. Today she says, "I like the red, but he likes the pink; too bad, Ill buy the red. Its not that she loves him less, its that relationships have changed. Most of the time now she pays for the dress. The clothes I design now must make sense in a womans life a much more realistic one than the life she led in the Sixties.

JS: Have colors changed a lot become more daring?

OR: Not really. Color is a selling point the consumer is often very sensitive to what colors suit her. But when you philosophize about fashion and the impact it has on society, color plays a less important role. When a woman buys a dress today she knows that she will have to wear it many, many times. She is far more concerned with wearability and durability. Just as men wear grey and navy, women today dress in colors that are not vivid, not memorable, because they want to wear an outfit repeatedly.

JS: To what extent, then, can one make really expensive clothes today? Is it easier? Harder?

OR: If you are designing really expensive clothes, you are addressing a very small percentage of the population. If you are talking about haute couture I design for the House of Balmain in Paris the percentage is even smaller. But if you consider the economics of Balmain, or Dior, or Chanel, or Yves Saint Laurent, the publicity that our collections generate is worth a vast amount of paid advertising. If I had to replace it with space bought in the magazines, I would have to spend twenty times more. Today my biggest business is not fashion as such, but fashion-related products: perfume, accessories, and so on. My fashion business is still profitable but for the amount of time and effort put into it, it is not profitable enough on its own. But it is my flagship business, what creates the image, and that is extremely important.

JS: Are there two camps among fashion designers? One that sets out to make a woman look her best, another that treats her as a blank canvas on which to display his ideas? When these are extravagant ideas Im thinking of designers like Vivienne Westwood or Versace dont we get clothes which the ordinary woman cant or wont wear?

OR: Certainly these two designers are extremely talented. Vivienne Westwood in particular is a designers designer who influences others. But today the avant-garde designers are people like Prada or Ann Demeulemeester from Belgium. The big word for this group of designers is deconstruction. But they still draw their ideas essentially from the street. Young people in the street have been the biggest providers of ideas for fashion since the Sixties with very few interruptions.

JS: Do you design anything for men?

OR: Yes, a line of mens clothes that carries the name "Oscar de la Renta Pour Homme, expensive, carried in boutiques across the world. Also suits under the label of "Oscar de la Renta, at about $400, $500 each. We do $50 million worth of business across the United States.

JS: Who today would be an icon of fashion for men like Cary Grant or Robert Taylor in the Thirties? Brad Pitt? Yet who over thirty could think of dressing in that style or of wearing that forgive me permanent designer stubble?

OR: Do you think that today the movie star male or female seriously influences fashion? If so, I dont agree. At the time of Grant and Taylor, how a star dressed was still strongly dictated by the studios in order to develop the image of different actors and actresses. Women like Marilyn Monroe were also a great influence. Yet their looks too were really created by the studios. Today the studios do not exist, and there is no such thing as a fashion icon, either for men or for women, about whom people say, "I want to dress like that. Its more anonymous. Fashion comes from the street and goes back to the street. For instance, a few years ago grunge was a big thing in fashion. That came strictly from the street.

JS: Did it go out of fashion because the street dropped it or did the designers move on to something else?

OR: No, it is the other way round. Once it becomes fashionable, it is no longer fashionable for the kids. They go on to something else.

JS: But the people with money are not the young but those in their middle years. Shouldnt fashion bear in mind the middle-aged wife of a corporate executive in Chicago or St. Louis?

OR: This is my argument with the fashion magazines, which are so tremendously influenced by youth. The real consumer is not someone thirty years old. So when Im doing a collection, I balance several different considerations.

The most important thing for any collection is that it is identifiable as the style of the designer, but in doing that I try to arrange my collections so that they will be a balance of clothes where some will be more appreciated by the press and others by the real customer.

JS: Has the ideal of the womans figure you design for changed greatly?

OR: Women and men today are far more conscious of their body and of exercise. Everyone is into some sport. So you will see better bodies than in the past. But when you travel outside the fashionable cities, America is terribly overweight.

JS: James Laver saw fashion as a social indicator: periods of fashion androgyny were times of social radicalism; periods when a voluptuous figure was "in were socially conservative.

OR: I am sure that fashion reflects wider social movements, but you have to stand back and distinguish long-term trends from short-term fads to see exactly how.

Diors New Look, for instance, beautiful as it was, turned out not to be the beginning of a major trend. It reflected the reaction against wartime and postwar austerity in the Fifties, but not the changes in peoples lives as the postwar boom continued. Courrcges in the 1960s had an even shorter life. His extravagant futuristic designs reflected the future as the scientists forecast it, not the future as it turned out a future of more work, more freedom, more independence.

Seen in this light, Coco Chanel is the designer of the century. Her suit is both chic and practical. It fits both the woman of fashion and the working woman. So it is the perfect expression in fashion of an age of transition for women as they move from the home into the workplace. My guess for the future it can be no more than that is that women, having proved themselves at work and taking a career for granted, may now invest more of their personality in private life. If so, we may see a revival of those softer, more feminine fashions mentioned above.

JS: If somebody sought fame through assassination, would he select a fashion designer? Plainly Im thinking of Versace. Was he killed because the designer is now a star?

OR: When someone stalks a movie star, a designer, or a writer, its not because of their profession, but because these are famous people and the assassin can become famous by killing them as Herostratus became famous by burning down the Temple of Diana. With the advent of tabloid magazines, new classes of celebrities have been created. Designers have become as famous as their customers. And we have to feed this public, whatever field we are in cooking, decorating, or designing. I sell my clothes partly because I advertise my name.