The world remembers Oscar de la Renta for the dresses, of course, and for the well-connected New Yorkers who were in his orbit. Cornelia Guest remembers how he helped give her dog a bath.
Mr. de la Renta, the fashion designer who died on Monday, spent many weekends on her parents’ estate on Long Island before she was born in 1963. “I have a picture of him holding me when I am a couple of years old,” she recalled this week. “My parents’ house was called Templeton. He called me the little beast of Templeton. I just called him Oscar.”
The dog was a mastiff named Boo. “I always wanted to give Boo a bath — kids always want to give their dogs a bath,” she said. “I always enlisted him to help me.”
So was Mr. de la Renta, who designed elegant dresses for boldface types, good at something as potentially inelegant as bathing a dog?
“He was a lot better than I was at it,” she said. “The dog sat there and behaved.”
Mr. de la Renta became a household name in the intersecting worlds of New York — the worlds of power and money — as a tastemaker, a couturier not only to socialites but also to celebrities. He was a presence at galas, but his influence touched powerful men and their wives (in de la Renta dresses) and politics, from the White House when Ronald Reagan was president to City Hall when Michael R. Bloomberg was mayor. “The question is, how wasn’t he a part of New York?” said the designer Carolyne Roehm, who was his assistant for 10 years, beginning in the 1970s.
Ms. Roehm flew with Mr. de la Renta and his first wife, Françoise, when he was starting his fragrance line in Los Angeles.
“I remember hearing them talk about who they’d be seeing in California and thinking, man, they are really a couple,” Ms. Roehm said. “I hadn’t thought of them in those terms. He was my idol and she was Mrs. de la Renta, this French lady I was intimidated by. But then I saw them as a force, as an entity, and that’s what they were, a force in New York.” (Françoise de la Renta died in 1983; he married Annette Engelhard Reed, who survives him, in 1989.)
Mr. de la Renta, born in Santo Domingo, had arrived in New York in the 1960s from Paris. “Oscar brought his charm, his Dominican charm, his joie de vivre to New York,” Ms. Guest said. “He loved to dance, he loved to laugh, he loved to tease. He loved to have fun, and make women look beautiful.”
There were those who referred to their “Oscars,” as Hillary Rodham Clinton did when she wore a dark blue floor-length de la Renta to a benefit in 2003.
“This is one of my favorite Oscars,” she said.
Just last month, Chelsea Clinton said that Mr. de la Renta and Diane von Furstenberg were “two of our closest family friends” and that she and her mother had just had dinner with them a couple of nights earlier.
Timeline: Oscar de la Renta’s Life Through the Years
Mr. de la Renta and Ms. von Furstenberg gave a goodbye dinner for Mayor Bloomberg in December, less than a month before his tenure ended. Liza Minnelli sang “New York, New York” to Mr. Bloomberg, whom Mr. de la Renta once called “the very best mayor this city has ever had.”
That was in 2012, when Mr. Bloomberg gave Mr. de la Renta the Couture Council award at Lincoln Center.
“People will disagree about just about anything,” the mayor said, “but they will agree on Oscar’s designs. In fact, one of the only things liberals and conservatives can agree about today is what a good call it was for Ann Romney to wear a red de la Renta dress to the convention.”
That line drew applause from the 600 guests. Mr. Bloomberg paused, then added, “They also agreed that it was a good call for Mitt not to.”
Mr. Bloomberg went on to salute Mr. de la Renta’s longevity. “In an industry where tastes come and go in a New York minute,” he continued, “Oscar’s designs are one thing that are always in vogue. If you think about it, he is the little black dress of high fashion — he just never goes out of style.”
On Tuesday, Ms. Guest remembered the de la Renta dresses her mother wore — and, when she was old enough, the ones he created for her.
“One of my favorite quotes ever was, ‘Walk like there’s three men behind you, watching, looking at you,' ” she said. “I loved it. He wanted women to feel sexy and gorgeous and feel good about themselves.”
An article on Thursday about Oscar de la Renta’s life and friendships in the New York region misstated, in some editions, the year his first wife, Françoise de la Renta, died. It was 1983, not 1989.