What Sarah Jessica Parker never forgets
about Oscar de la Renta

“I can’t remember how I had the courage to be friends with him.” Sarah Jessica Parker writes in her tribute to Oscar de la Renta. On Hollywoodreporter.com she writes about the void he leaves in the fashion world. And in her heart.

“Nobody is meant to fill the void. They can’t. All I can think today is; that’s it. That’s done, that extraordinary moment in time he created.”

He dreamed about fashion with his many sisters, worked for Balenciaga and Lanvin. He created the presidential wife outfits of Jackie Kennedy, the inauguration cape of Hillary Clinton that she wore when her husband was sworn in as president. That’s where it started and it ended with the wedding dress of Amal Alamuddin. Excuse me, Amal Clooney.

“When someone passes who’s led a wonderfully long life, you hear the news and immediately think of his beloved wife and friends and in this case all those who work in his studio. There are wonderfully talented designers but he really was a singular and has left a vacuum.”

Oscar danced in Parisian nightclubs and embraced Francoise de Langlade there. He let her go only twenty years later. Because he had to. She died of breast cancer. Oscar adopted a child himself and remarried years later and was still with this woman. It exists. Even Anna Wintour called him her ‘one of her closest friends’.

“I can’t remember how I had the courage to be friends with him. He was otherworldly in a way. I don’t know if he ever really watched SATC, but I’m certain he was aware of the show because he made a dress for the scene later.”

You know, that scene where Carrie gets a Oscar de la Renta from lover Alexandr Petrovsky. It turns out that in reality Mikhail Baryshnikov (the dancer/actor who plays Petrovsky and could have just as well kept his own name in the series, but that’s beside the point) was very good friends with Oscar. Both had a house in the Dominican Republic, long evenings in the summer heat. Can you imagine? And Sarah Jessica Parker who also joined them. “We all were friends,” she writes.

Sarah Jessica never forgets the first dress she borrowed from him. The 2000 collection. Spring. It was look 67. The dress, the history, the man.

“It also needs to be said that there was no one more handsome.”

Amen.

Here’s to Oscar.

Read the whole letter? www.hollywoodreporter.com