what would Oscar de la Renta do?
what happens when your brand is alive but you aren't
So…the inauguration happened. Or, something of an inauguration. The ceremony was held indoors in the Rotunda for the first time since the 1980s and included a front row of billionaires being trailed closely behind in the second row by the…..president’s cabinet. Yep….that’s a good sign of things to come!
And because fashion is political (quite literally in this case, as LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault was silently in the building before being whisked away again for Paris Fashion Week), we the people wanted to see what statements people would be making via their clothing of choice. And while this was one of the more drab inaugurations I’ve been alive to witness (Ella Emhoff is a tough act to follow if you really like fashion), I walked away from the events of the day thinking about…..Ivanka.
And not in the way that you think. Being by far the most good looking of Donnie’s children, I expected for the general public to look toward Ivanka for fashion updates. And that is exactly what happened. Ivanka, along with Usha Vance wore Oscar de la Renta for the events of that week. Even Melania wore an outfit by Adam Lippes, who was once the youngest creative director at ODLR from 1996-2003. But the outcry from people online when Ivanka was highlighted for her Oscar de la Renta dress at the inaugural dinner sparked an interesting debate within me about a long held belief I’ve had regarding the founding of a business. And it is a belief that I see people run in the opposite direction of all the time.
I’m talking about my personal cardinal business rule- never name a business after yourself. *braces to be pelted with rotten tomatoes* There are a number of reasons why I would caution anyone against doing that. For starters, when you name a business after yourself, you’re basically signing up to be the spokesperson of that business in perpetuity. You will always have to live and die by the court of public opinion and people will not separate you from your business, for better or worse. It’s entirely too much to live up to. You also have a harder time making objective decisions about your business when it’s named after you. When faced with tough decisions, I’ve seen people try to swim upstream for the simple fact that they see their eponymous brand as experiencing a personal failure because, it’s their name on the line. It clouds people’s judgment time and time again.
But in the case of Oscar de la Renta, I now think that naming a business after yourself is a bad idea for an entirely different reason. In case you weren’t aware, the original Oscar de la Renta has passed on. He died in 2014, just a year after his brand joined Instagram, before we knew what it would become under Meta. He never even saw the internet post-algorithm and if he’s anything like other people I knew around his age, he wouldn’t have cared to be part of it. I can’t help but wonder if he, the real Oscar, would have cared to be a part of dressing this political family.
Oscar de la Renta was born in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, in 1932. He was the youngest of seven children, born to a Dominican mother and a Puerto Rican father. He came from quite a well to do family, with his father being the owner of an insurance company and his mother’s side of the family being part of Dominican high society. Oscar studied in Spain where he drew sketches for magazines for pocket money and when one of his sketches caught the eye of the U.S. ambassador’s wife, the wheels swiftly were in motion. Oscar apprenticed for Cristobal Balenciaga (another person who has no control over what his name is being stamped on in death) and then went on to Paris to work under Lanvin. Many years later, ODLR is a respected name in luxury fashion and has always been a house that buyers could count on to be the antidote to vulgarity. Through every style wave, the ODLR woman held tight to her freshwater pearls. Are the people that were dressed at the inauguration a reflection of that? Of choosing class even when the world is not?
And it’s not lost on me that just because Oscar was Latino, that he would have been anti Trump. In fact in this recent election, many Latino voters were open about their support for Republicans Trump this time around. And this is not a new phenomenon- in Miami for example, there’s a sizable Cuban community that has been known to vote conservatively for decades at this point even with consistent anti-immigration rhetoric. But the part of this that stirs me is that we will never know what side of the coin Oscar would have flipped because he’s not here. His name is being associated with current events that he has no say over. When we pass on and we leave a business in our wake, I’m sure we want to believe we’ve left it in the hands of capable people. But once we’re no longer in this dimension, we relinquish control. People are free to act as they choose- and do so under the banner of our names in the process.
Choose wisely.
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-xoxo Jenn