Oscar De La Renta's Death Shocked Us All

2023 Author: Leslie Forster | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-26 07:36

Óscar de la Renta died last night, at the age of 82, and his death has left us all in shock.

The designer of Dominican origin had been fighting cancer for more than eight years, but finally he could not win the battle. As we can read on the BBC in Spanish, de la Renta died last night in the privacy of his home in Kent, Connecticut, along with his wife Annette de la Renta, who was in charge of giving the sad news.

The reasons why this loss is so shocking at the international level are the following:

-Nobody expected this sudden death, since it was the designer himself who presented his spring 2015 collection on September 9, at Fashion Week in New York, just a month ago.

-De la Renta was the preferred designer of great celebrities such as Madonna, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cameron Diaz, Shakira. And she was working until the last moment on Amal Alamuddin's wedding dress for her recent wedding to George Clooney.

-He not only dressed celebrities, he also has the merit of being the first couturier to work in a French Haute Couture house and has always been a leader in the first ladies of the United States, as he dressed Jackie Kennedy, Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Reagan and the current Michelle Obama.

-His son Moisés de la Renta is adopted and also comes from the Dominican Republic. He thus becomes the sole heir to his father's fortune. Jesús Mari Montes-Fernández, director of Flash Moda told how this adoption was: “He found it 25 years ago in a basket. He was standing next to the garbage cans near his house, he adopted him and named him universal heir. Hence its name. I had this generosity with everyone, I helped everyone.”

-Another reason why we all deeply regret his loss is that in addition to being one of the best designers on the scene today, with his exquisite and distinguished designs, he had a big heart. His donations to the neediest children in his country, the Dominican Republic, are well known, but among them it is worth mentioning the creation of an orphanage to welcome 310 homeless children.

-On the other hand, he showed how good a person he was with his own professional colleagues, helping another designer, John Galiano, when he had a bad time for his racist insults at a couple of men in a Paris bar due to the effects of alcohol. Galiano was expelled from Dior, where he had been working for 15 years. It was then that De la Renta hired him in his studio and publicly stated: “John and I have known each other for a long time, and I am a great admirer of his talent. I'm glad to be able to provide you with this opportunity.”

There are many celebrities who have already expressed the pain of their loss on social networks: