A Studio Tour of Monse, The Edgy Label Started By Former Oscar de la Renta Designers
Photography by Dustin Aksland
When designers Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim told Oscar de la Renta they were leaving his label to start their own, they got pushback from the late, great man. “Oscar didn’t understand,” Kim says early one morning last month in the new studio for their new line, Monse (pronounced mon-SAY). “He kept asking us, ‘Why would you leave?’ and ‘Are you going to Giorgio Armani?’”
They were not; they simply wanted to go their own way. At that point, Kim had worked for de la Renta for 12 years (as design director), while Garcia had been there for six (overseeing eveningwear and VIP clients), and they wanted to make clothing for a younger, more free-spirited woman than the one they’d been dressing at Oscar. Monse’s first season, in 2015, was full of deconstructed, almost-unraveling pieces—some were so unlike what they’d done before that the pair were scared to present them. “We worried, ‘Are we really doing a dress where you can’t wear a bra?” Kim says. “And that was our best seller.”
In just one season, Monse has been embraced by celebrities (Amal Clooney, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Selena Gomez) and celebrity retailers (Net-a-Porter’s Sarah Rutson), and the brand’s runway show Friday of relaxed yet sexy clothing (striped cocktail dresses, evening jackets with dress-shirt cuffs) at the High Line Hotel in New York was roundly applauded.
As for how Oscar would have responded to the braless dress? “He would have said, ‘It’s a bridge too far guys,’” Garcia says, laughing.
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.
