A major event in a famous person's career

Oscar de la Renta



Oscar de la Renta was born on July 22nd, 1932, in the Dominican Republic. During his childhood, he had showed a lot of interest for the arts. He had been taking art classes since he was 10 years old. He had decided to leave the island to study painting in Madrid however, after a short time in Spain, he had been enticed by fashion and 2 years later, he had just decided to switch his focus. He had been working as a magazine illustrator for Balenciaga and quickly became one of the most famous designers. His style had inspired women all around the world, and several of them had been presidential first ladies.








In 1961, he had been hired for his first real fashion job at Lanvin-Castillo. He had moved to New York and joined the American design house of Elizabeth Arden. He had begun his own signature ready-to-wear label since 1965.




Despite Oscar de la Renta had suffered a great tragedy in the 1980s because his wife death (bone cancer in 1983) he did something exceptional; he adopted a son, whom he named Moises Oscar. He had found the boy in an orphanage (day care center named Casa de Niños that he had funded and where he had been working and giving support) in his native country. The center gave children who lived in poverty a place to go and parents a place to leave their children in safety. As soon as he saw the boy who became his son, de la Renta became extremely drawn to him and despite the fact that friends were against the adoption, the designer took the child home as his own.









De la Renta had been diagnosed with cancer during the first decade of the 2000s. He died of complications from the disease on October 20, 2014 at the age of 82 in Kent, Connecticut.