Oscar de la Renta may be New York old guard, but he did his best to make Desirée Rogers and the rest of his audience today forget it, sending a few of his models out clutching iPads tucked into luxe leather covers, not to mention streaming the show live on Facebook. He's embraced twenty-first-century technology, to be sure, and there were a lot of toned young legs on display, courtesy of his of-the-moment forties-retro shorts. Still, things haven't changed all that much chez Oscar.
His clients will find new reasons to whip out the charge card in the collection's embellished jackets, accessorized here, as at Jason Wu, with jaunty straw boaters. And he might nab himself a few new ones with similar silhouettes cut from peppy, pieced denim or khaki. De la Renta amped up the prints and the embroideries—he's not one for fashion's latest preoccupation with minimalism.
Nowhere was that more true than in his evening offerings, which ranged from a narrow abstractly beaded black net column with cap sleeves to a corseted ball gown boasting voluminous point d'esprit skirts, and in between, a nod to Cristobal Balenciaga in a black grommeted white dress that belled out below the waist.
