“Spill, Fernando, spill.”
Laura Kim is playfully goading her work husband, Fernando Garcia, about reports that Oscar de la Renta, the American label they lead as co-creative directors, has been chosen to design the dress for what will surely be the most over-the-top wedding of the year. This summer in Venice, Lauren Sanchez is finally — reportedly — marrying Jeff Bezos.
Garcia, who oversees all the celebrity and VIP client fittings, doesn’t take the bait. “I can’t,” he says politely, allowing only that Sanchez is “nurturing” and “electric.” “Her personality is amazing,” Kim adds. “You want to be around her.”
It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Sanchez is dating one of the wealthiest men in the world. She was already an Oscar shopper when Garcia and Kim befriended her last year ahead of her first Met Gala. They designed a custom gown for her that was less cleavage-forward than her usual look, and since then, she has become a repeat client. Sanchez enlisted the duo to make the suits for her all-female space flight scheduled to take off on Monday. The bootcut neoprene uniforms are tight and flattering, and branded with the logos for both Blue Origin (Bezos’s private space company) and Monse, the smaller, edgier label Garcia and Kim co-founded in 2015.
We’re sitting over a table of pastries at Monse’s offices on Rivington Street, where the designers will soon open its first store on the ground floor. Garcia and Kim met nearly 16 years ago while working for Mr. De la Renta, who was then in his mid-70s and enjoying his status as an elder statesman of American fashion. Kim and Garcia, two 20-somethings in their first jobs, found they could be brutally honest with each other, a dynamic that set the tone for their friendship. “Because we remind each other,” Garcia says … “How bad the other is,” Kim adds.
Lauren Sanchez wearing Oscar de la Renta to the Met Gala in 2024.
Photo: Taylor Hill/Getty Images
I can see why someone like Sanchez would be put at ease by their self-deprecating candor. She’s a helicopter pilot and space enthusiast with a penchant for hot-pink minidresses and cropped tops — a far cry from the once traditional Oscar client, Park Avenue grandes dames such as Mica Ertegun and Nan Kempner who represented a blue-chip image of tasteful dressing. That era was already ending by the time de la Renta died in 2014. To survive in fashion today without the much larger resources of the billion-dollar European houses and their sheltering luxury groups, Kim and Garcia can’t afford to be snobs about clients or exposure. Nor do they need or want to be. They’ve held their jobs at Oscar for nearly a decade, a lifetime in this business, by saying “yes.” Yes to almost every major celebrity, yes to Trumpworld and the Resistance Dems, and yes to an advertising campaign for a smart toilet.
As part of that campaign, Kim recently designed a black, chiffon dress “inspired by the sleek silhouette, honed black finish, and bold simplicity of Kohler’s Veil Smart Toilet.” In February, Kohler sponsored Monse’s runway show. “I actually wanted the runway seats to be toilets, but they’re like $6,000 each,” says Kim, who has a side career as an Instagram lifestyle influencer. Garcia, his turn to tease, stops her from elaborating. “We are not cool at all,” he says.
On paper, Kim, 42, and Garcia, 38, have little in common. She was born in Seoul, grew up in Calgary, and moved to New York to study fashion at the Pratt Institute. Her mother sent her there to land a rich husband, but instead she landed an internship at Oscar in 2003, the year before she graduated. At first, she was just known as “blouse girl,” but she eventually worked her way up to become de la Renta’s design director. Garcia, who joined six years after Kim, started as the handbag intern. He grew up in the Dominican Republic, where his family had a connection to de la Renta. He soon realized he had a knack for managing clients, especially celebrities. “Fernando is very good with women,” says Kim. “Including myself.”
In the early 2000s, the fashion industry was less corporate and more cloistered. Celebrity models were still a new concept. The very first fashion bloggers were still years away from sitting at runway shows. No one shopped for gowns online. De la Renta was an éminence grise and a celebrity in his own right, long before every major designer had a Hollywood agent. But he didn’t take himself too seriously.
Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim met working for Oscar de la Renta nearly 16 years ago.
Photo: Yael Malka
Kim recalls an afternoon when they took de la Renta for the first time to a Pret a Manger. He cut the line, as he did everywhere, but no one recognized him. “He comes back upstairs with his little bag of food, giggling quietly, and sits down. And Alex is like, ‘You went to Pret?’” Garcia says, referring to Alex Bolen, de la Renta’s son-in-law and the company’s chief executive. De la Renta replied with his famously silky tenor, “Yes, and everybody clapped because I was there.”
When the designer died at age 82, Bolen hired British designer Peter Copping to succeed him, passing over Kim and Garcia, who were still in their late 20s. At the time, the choice made some sense: Copping hadn’t worked with the founder, but he had led Nina Ricci and, like de la Renta, trained in European ateliers. Kim and Garcia, who had harbored aspirations to run their own line, left to start Monse. What came next was what Garcia called “the most grueling two years” of their lives.
Monse’s debut spring 2016 collection was a critical and commercial success, turning the duo into the next designers to watch in a city where few creative directors can cut and sew garments anymore. Around the same time, Kim and Garcia quietly started consulting for longtime Oscar rival Carolina Herrera. When Copping turned out to be the wrong fit for Oscar, Bolen rehired Kim and Garcia as co-creative directors in 2016. Herrera sued Oscar and Kim, arguing the hire violated her non-compete agreement. The matter was settled, but the legal dispute was public and messy, revealing the salary Herrera offered Kim ($1 million per year with a $20,000 clothing allowance) and alleging the two labels poached employees from each other. Kim and Garcia, who had at one point been engaged to be married, broke things off. (They’ve both long since moved on: Garcia is openly gay, and Kim lives with her boyfriend, the Swedish entrepreneur Linus Adolffson.)
“We definitely saw the nasty side of the city, the people in it, of each other — and we survived it,” Garcia says. “I feel like we look at the city from a sky-rise, like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that before.’” Nothing rattles them anymore. “We get punched left, right, and center, and we just pick ourselves back up,” he says. Kim adds that working with Garcia doesn’t feel like work: “Other than the times I have to look at P&L.”
Kim tracks profits and losses more closely since the pandemic, which battered American fashion and underscored the precarity of running a privately owned label largely through department stores. The designers co-own Monse, while Oscar, which Bolen once described as “either the biggest of the small independent brands, or the smallest of the big,” remains family owned. (The business was reported to bring in $120 million a year in 2023.) Since 2020, Oscar has stopped hosting expensive runway spectacles. When the brand does stage shows or special events, the guests are clients, not critics or editors. Its splashiest marketing moments come from red carpets and awards shows.
From left: Taylor Swift wears Oscar de la Renta to the Grammys in 2021. Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording AcademyAnd wears Monse to the VMAs in 2024. Photo: Christopher Polk/Billboard via Getty Images
From top: Taylor Swift wears Oscar de la Renta to the Grammys in 2021. Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording AcademyAnd wears Monse to the…
From top: Taylor Swift wears Oscar de la Renta to the Grammys in 2021. Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording AcademyAnd wears Monse to the VMAs in 2024. Photo: Christopher Polk/Billboard via Getty Images
I ask Kim and Garcia what would surprise de la Renta most about their work today. “These days, Fernando just puts in these gowns that are borderline couture,” says Kim, referring to elaborate designs that can start at $15,000, a price tag that was once solely the province of one-of-a-kind haute couture. The shift started with an “astronomically expensive” ball gown Garcia designed for their first collection as creative directors. Nicki Minaj wore it to a party in 2017 and, Garcia says, “I’m all of a sudden doing these fully embroidered dresses.” Like the floral mini Taylor Swift wore to accept Album of the Year at the Grammys in 2021. The day after the ceremony, the same dress was available to Oscar shoppers to preorder for around $9,000. “We took a low margin on it because we were like, okay, a teeny little dress can’t be that expensive,” says Kim. The first shipment sold out before it even reached stores. Kim says de la Renta would have never allowed himself to do the same because, as the owner, he kept a strict limit on dress-development costs. Now, ready-to-wear prices are up everywhere in the luxury market, and clients don’t seem to mind. “In ten years, I think the billionaires came out of nowhere — there’s so much money now,” says Kim.
Kim and Garcia credit their commercial savvy to de la Renta. In the final years that they worked for him, they competed with him and each other to design the label’s best-selling dress each season. Kim says she usually won, at least on a per-unit basis, while de la Renta would argue he had won on a dollar basis, since he typically designed more expensive dresses. “He was the most competitive,” she says. “When the company didn’t do well, it came out of his own pocket.” She and Garcia carry the same mentality at both brands.
“I could pay them no higher compliment than to say that they are businesspeople,” says Bolen.
On the day of our interview, the future Monse shop looks ready for customers. Bedazzled football-shaped handbags sit on a pedestal, and on the racks hang versions of the crisscross tailored jacket that Michelle Obama wore at the Democratic National Convention last year. The appearance boosted sales after a sleepy period for the label. “It was the rebirth for Monse,” says Garcia, who says running their own business gives them a healthier perspective on their work at Oscar.
From left: Michelle Obama wears Monse to speak at the DNC in 2024. Photo: The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesIvanka Trump wears Oscar de la Renta to a pre-inauguration dinner in January. Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
From top: Michelle Obama wears Monse to speak at the DNC in 2024. Photo: The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesIvanka Trump wears Os…
From top: Michelle Obama wears Monse to speak at the DNC in 2024. Photo: The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesIvanka Trump wears Oscar de la Renta to a pre-inauguration dinner in January. Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
While Obama drove sales at Monse, the Trumps drove sales at Oscar. During inauguration weekend, the label dressed Ivanka Trump and Usha Vance in custom looks. In the days that followed, customers requested the dresses and coats they wore, says Bolen. During Donald Trump’s first administration, American designers mostly refused to make pieces for the women in his orbit. In January, Oscar’s social-media accounts posted the inauguration looks, which read to some dismayed online commenters as an endorsement. You can still find angry comments on Kim’s and Garcia’s personal Instagram accounts. The designers are unfazed.
Garcia rehashes the well-worn argument that it’s an honor to dress any member of the First Family, and points out that de la Renta made clothes for both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush. I ask if there is anyone they would decline to dress in Monse, where they are owners, not employees, and their answer is the same. “I don’t want to alienate anyone,” Kim says. “We’re not in it to make a political statement.” For them, dressing a political figure is no different from dressing a celebrity.
In a few weeks, Kim and Garcia are heading to Houston for a trunk show at Tootsie’s, a boutique known for catering to the oil-money set. Last time they were in town, Bush co-hosted a trunk show for Oscar with Neiman Marcus. When de la Renta was still alive, Kim and Garcia didn’t understand why these regional events were so important. Now, they’re heading back there for Monse. “I love going to Texas,” says Kim. “At the events, they don’t serve cheap Champagne. It’s Dom Pérignon.”
