Family was of the utmost importance to him. Oscar de la Renta, a storied couturier with a flair for the romantic, who dressed countless members of Hollywood, political, and actual royalty in a six-decade fashion career, died Monday at age 82 at his home in Kent, Connecticut, his wife Anette de la Renta told The New York Times. We all flew down to the presidential library and the show was full of exquisite, elegant de la Renta clothes worn by former First Ladies from Nancy Reagan to Laura Bush. De la Renta followed his vision through until the very end, making headlines just last month for designing Amal Clooney’s stunning wedding gown, for her Venice-set nuptials to George Clooney.
– Fashion designer and icon Oscar de la Renta died yesterday at 82, after a yearslong battle with cancer, the New York Times reports. His illness, the paper notes, didn't slow him down: He designed Amal Alamuddin's dress for her wedding to George Clooney just last month, and his business expanded by 50% in the eight years he faced the disease. The Dominican Republic-born designer's clientele ranged from first ladies—including Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, and Michelle Obama, Vanity Fair reports—to Oscar winners. "You want to know who my customer is?” he once asked. "All the women who can afford to buy my clothes!" He began work in fashion design in the 1950s in Spain, when the wife of the then-US ambassador saw his drawings and sought a dress for her daughter. His career moved him to Paris and eventually the US in 1963. By the 1970s, de la Renta and his first wife, Françoise de Langlade, were "the Social Lions of New York," André Leon Talley writes in Vogue. The Times notes that the couple were central to the rise of designers as the social elite. But de la Renta didn't see his work as particularly "heavy. Somebody might ask, 'What is Oscar de la Renta?' And you could say, 'It's a pretty dress.'"