Designers LA Dispensasi

Archive for September, 2011

Born on July 22, 1932 in city of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Oscar de la Renta is one of the leading fashion designers in the world.

Born as Oscar Aristides Renta Fiallo, de la Renta is a son of a Puerto Rican father and Dominican mother. When he turned 18, he moved to Spain to continue his studies. He attended the Academy of San Fernando in the city of Madrid and studied painting. He then developed his passion for fashion designing and started making sketches for famous fashion houses in Spain. This paved way to his apprenticeship to Cristóbal Balenciaga, considered as the most popular Spanish couturier. When De la Renta moved to Paris, he worked for Antonio Castillo as his couture assistant.

In 1963, torn between choosing a job as a designer for Elizabeth Arden or designing ready-to-wear clothes, shoes, and accessories for Christian Dior in New York City, he seek the advice of the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine Diana Vreeland. With his goal of creating his own label to make money, Vreeland advised de la Renta to work for Elizabeth Arden instead for the reason that it is with Arden that he could build up his reputation in the fashion industry faster; since Arden is not a designer hence she would be promoting de la Renta’s work. Diana Vreeland added that if he chose to work for Dior, he would always remain a shadow to Dior’s name.

Hence, in 1963, de la Renta started working for Elizabeth Arden in New York City. Two years after, he created his own ready-to-wear label. Over the years, he won numerous awards including CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award (1990) and CFDA Womenswear Designer of the Year (2000). At preset, Oscar is considered as one of the beast and lading fashion designer in the world.

Types of Fashion Designs

Fashion designers usually depend upon textile designs to set their fashion collections as unique. These designs are the work of trained textile designers who design fabric weaves and prints for clothes and furnishings. There are essentially three categories of fashion design.

Haute couture: The high-fashion clothings, haute couture, is originally a French term meaning ‘high sewing’ but today it has come to represent high end fashion clothing which can cost anywhere between few thousands to few lacs of dollars. Created for specific clients with “made-to-measure” technique, they are usually made from high-quality, expensive fabric and sewn with great attention to detail and finish, often made with time-consuming, hand-executed methods. What is important in them is look and fit. Cost of materials and the time to make them doesn’t matter- they can go to any extreme. In fact, Haute couture is a protected term which can only be officially used by companies that are the members of and meet certain well-defined standards set by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture. Many ready-to-wear, and even mass market labels, claim to manufacture haute couture but according to established standards, they do not.

Ready-to-wear: These garments are not made for individual customers, but then also, much attention is paid to select the proper fabrics and their cuts. To maintain exclusivity, only a small quantity of such garments are manufactured and as such they are comparatively expensive but not like haute couture. They are produced as ready-to-wear collections and presented during fashion weeks, usually twice in a year. These collections can be under fashion designers own labels or under label of any fashion company for whom designers have made it. They can include anything from day wear or evening wear for men, women, teenage, lingerie, sportswear, bridal wear to even accessories.

Mass market clothing: As the above two categories come in very high and high price ranges which can be afforded only by a small section of consumers, the fashion industry mostly depends on mass market sales. This market presents a very wide range of ready-to-wear clothes in large quantities and standard sizes. Most often, cheap material and simple machine production techniques are used but the designs represent creativity. This helps in producing affordable fashion for all. The designs are, however, adapted form the trends set by the famous names in fashion. As such, they hit the market after a season or two.

Hopefully, now you know what you can get in the fashion stores and how to differentiate among them. Happy shopping then!

For the upper echelon and privileged classes in our society, style and fashion gurus unequivocally exert an enormous amount of influence. At this juncture the most famous and the most important method designers of the 20th century were:

The designer Gabrielle or Coco Chanel. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, known as Coco, learned to sew at a young age, while spending time in a Roman Catholic monastery’s orphanage. At the age of 18 in 1901, she set out from school to work with a local tailor, in what can only be called an ironic twist to the rags to riches story of fame and fortune. Throughout this time, she began to design hats, which fascinated the interest of the privileged, together with her enthusiast, French millionaire Ettienne Balsan–her doorway to high Parisian culture. She opened her own boutique in 1910. In the 1920s, she burst onto the fashion scene with her minimalist styles constructed using readily-available fabrics and simple designs. Even though Chanel died in 1971, her fashion is still around today. Chanel has one of the top perfumes in the world today – No.5. Everyone knows Chanel as the person responsible for bringing pants to women’s fashion but did you know Chanel was on TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century and was the only one named to this list from the haute couture field?

The designer Calvin Klein. Calvin Richard Klein was brought up alongside Robert Denning, Ralph Lauren and such, designers raised in the Jewish immigrant community. He is a graduate of FIT in New York. Even though he did not graduate and finish, the New York fashion institute thought of him as one of their own, giving him a special Doctorate in 2003. He was on the cover of Vogue after just one year. He came up with a line of fashion which met the needs for any and every event. He founded his first business in 1968, and since that time has varied his product offerings to include clothing, various types of perfumes, and jewelry.

Ralph Lauren is another top of the line designer famous for his Polo line. Despite his poor beginnings as a traveling salesman for a necktie maker, he later became famous for his Polo Ralph Lauren line of clothing. He started to sell his line of Polo ties in 1967, but his greatest achievement was having his designs used in a film in the 1974 film The Great Gatsby, with Robert Redford in the lead role. Ralph Lauren is listed as the 224th most wealthy person in the world, his worth his estimated at $2.8 billion.

Yves Saint Laurent is well known in the fashion and cosmetic world. One of the greatest and most influential fashion designers is this French designer who was born in Algeria. More well known as Yves Saint Laurent (born as Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent), he is thought of an icon when it comes to ready to wear clothes. His avant garde designs revolutionized the fashion world when he developed the ready-to-wear scene in the 1920s. Another landmark in Yves Saint Laurent’s career was his introduction of power suits for the career-oriented woman, in addition to smoking jackets for men, in 1966. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City honored Saint Laurent by making him the first living designer to receive an award from the museum. On June 1, 2009 Yves passed away as a result of brain cancer.

Artists, fashion designers make their designs very powerful in the world’s culture. The famous designs mean that their names are well-known and will be for many years to come.