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With each collection we design,
we're telling a specific story.
It's a form of expression that's inspired
by a feeling, a memory, an image, something that
sparks passion, creativity, and inspires
us to share that point of view to the world.
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For you to incorporate storytelling,
try to let it speak to you.
The collection is going to tell you where it
wants to go as you develop it.
So you want to pick up the front then?
Come look at the front.
It's, you see?
I think it's important to take a minute to step back and listen
to yourself.
Because you're the one seeing all the fittings,
absorbing all the information.
And sometimes you just forget to really listen to what you want.
And it gives you an answer where you
want to take the collection.
I do like to start talking to Fernando about inspirations
in the beginning.
And he gives me his ideas.
I almost feel like I want our client to be going on a trip,
like, our imaginary world.
It's always in a different form, what we're inspired.
I mean, our mood at the time definitely
affects the collection.
We look back to anything that feels right for us
at that moment.
So it could be, like, a food I ate when I was little.
Or it could be this artist you saw at an exhibition.
And there's also the subconscious level
of what you and I do.
We don't think that our cultures and our upbringing
probably had an influence on us.
But it absolutely did.
Yeah.
I think that, for instance, for me,
even though I love doing a black dress,
my fearlessness with color probably came from the fact
that I was surrounded by it in the Dominican Republic.
It had an impact in the way I see clothes and color.
I get inspired a lot by just random people walking by.
And I'll look good news in the morning.
And I'll look at, like, what the weather reporter's wearing.
And I'm like, oh, that's actually a really nice dress.
So it's everywhere.
It's not something you can pin on the board sometimes.
And we have a conversation about it.
It can be, like, a cup of coffee
and the color of green that it has.
It can be--
A picture of a really cute dog.
Or a hot guy on a beach that I saw, like, anything.
But--
That always helps.
But there's no wrong place of getting inspired from.
So we were watching Fantastic Mr. Fox
about three or four months ago.
And there was, like, a little rat character.
We were like, oh my god, he's wearing Monse.
It's a very good starting point.
He had a striped sweater on, which we love.
We love stripes.
And he was a little bit naughty.
And we're like, oh my god, he's such a cute little inspiration
and then--
So we Monse-fied it.
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Usually when we have a mood board,
starting in every collection, Laura and I
send pictures to each other back and forth.
Our team members have things that they want to show us.
And we start to collect all of these ideas.
And we print them out and we create a mood board.
This season, we were drawn towards those overgrown gardens
and landscape prints that we hadn't done
in a very long time at Oscar.
And that's something that we always think about.
We always have a starting point, or at least I do.
Is, what do I miss?
What have I not seen in a long time?
So in this case, you know, those Miranda Brook gardens.
And overgrown wheat fields.
And that Kirsten Dunst movie, "Marie Antoinette," when
she was running in the field.
That's one of Laura's favorite scenes ever.
All those things were percolating in our mind.
But it felt a little bit too classic.
So Laura found this artist called Ugo Rondinone.
What was beautiful about what he did is he
took our idea of nature and capturing
it, juxtaposing it with something very surreal.
These neon colors, and the clashing of these colors
were things that we hadn't seen before.
And it felt fresh to sort of disrupt nature that way.
Yeah, the synthetic colors really
work well with the nature.
And it brings something new to the idea
of doing a field print.
You do want to be inspired from the very beginning.
And once you get that going, the reality is when the clothes are
cut and you're fitting them on a human,
they can take you somewhere else.
If it's something that is meant to be malleable, and not tacked
or stitched up too much, you have
to figure out a way to make it look intentionally effortless.
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Once we have our mood board, we
talk to our different team members, such as fabric
development team, designers.
And we start launching swatches, fabrics, shapes.
And do endless trials.
And particularly, this season took a lot more trials
than I expected.
The prints sometimes take a little bit longer
than you think.
It's, I think, one of the more challenging parts of developing
a collection for Oscar.
Because it's something that our customer and everybody,
really, comes to Oscar for.
So it's a bit of a pressure cooker
to come up with something new every four months.
We just filter, and filter, and filter
until we arrive to the hero print of the collection.
And then we also have to do other versions of prints
for people that, perhaps, want something that is a little bit
more conservative or every day.
And all of those ideas, our team develops.
And eventually we start seeing the things
that came out successful.
And the things that didn't, we put to the back burner.
Because sometimes we have a mood for that idea that didn't
work in another collection.
So we really never toss anything, even at Monse.
Our design director Nick always has this back closet
that we don't know about.
And he, like, whips out-- he's like, remember this,
when we did this two years ago?
There will be moments where you're stuck.
And you wish you had a Nick in your life
that, like, pulled out something and it sparks an idea
right away.
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I didn't have a proper training in fashion.
I studied architecture.
I definitely had ideas that I wanted
to propose and see in reality.
And come up with ways of making my dream come
true with my sketch.
So as I would drape in the beginning days of Oscar,
and my sketch wasn't making sense with a drape,
I quickly learned that what I was trying to do
is force the fabric to do what my sketch was saying.
And what I learned from Laura and Oscar
is that I have to listen to the fabric.
And if your idea that you had from day one
walks into the room on a girl, and your team looks at it
like, it looks like a sketch, it doesn't
look like a garment, which happens often,
you need to figure out a way to make it exciting.
Clearly something got lost in translation.
Because fabric is the actual reality at the end,
not your sketch.
So you kind of have to let it be what--
It wants to be.
Yeah.
Wow, we rehearsed-- we got it.
Oh, shit.
I think that by the time the collection is 75% done,
I start to see the pieces as characters.
I know the ones that are going to be photographed.
I know the ones that are going to be on the runway show.
I'm already thinking of the music.
I'm already thinking of the girl.
I'm like thinking, I'm going to talk to my casting director
or to see who is going to be in town for this.
That is something that I have stopped doing
earlier on in the collection.
Because all of your ideas that you have at the very beginning,
all of them could be gone by the time the 75% is there.
So I'd rather just give that energy
for the last quarter of the development of the collection,
so that I could help, perhaps, filter down what the best
pieces are for the team.
And focus on them and make those even better at that point.
That was a good change, thank god.
Why?
Because you used to start with, like, music.
And like, can I have something more subjective?
Yeah, I definitely, I would start--
Like, Laura, listen to this music.
I'm like, stop it.
I would annoy Laura because I would have all these ideas
at the very beginning.
And you know, there was not even one dress finished.
I'm like, give me a sketch, give me a swatch.
My recommendation is not to get too hung up on an idea
that you have from day one.
And just see what the experiments turn out to be.
Because they might be completely different.
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What we're looking at now is a little bit more of, like,
the in-between stage, where experiments start to trickle
in.
And we start to see what's successful,
what should be something that is a fashion piece.
And how can we sort of multiply that idea further so
that the collection feels like it's well assorted
and it's cohesive?
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When Fernando has this board up, which is, like,
the middle part of our collection and our development
process, I make sure what I'm doing
and what he's doing is cohesive.
Like, we're on the same page and they can sit together,
complementing each other.
So he would be like, Laura, can I take what you're doing
and apply this flower?
Or I'll be like, let me take what he's doing
and use it in my pieces.
And it's nice to have it all up so everyone
knows what you're doing too.
Instead of just having it in your mind, which is what I do.
I hate making boards.
But it is helpful to see what he's doing.
I also have to think about, what
is a new texture that we're adding to the collection?
Ways of adding a little bit shine,
a little bit of embroidery.
I take a lot of our inspiration images
and pick colors of sequins or stones
I feel we haven't tried before, or unusual for Oscar to try.
So what usually happens is I ask our embroidery designer
in our team to print out a piece of the pattern
so that I could roughly draft where
I was thinking of all these swatches
be placed on the pattern.
And once I saw the cutout artwork
that they had developed from my sketch and my references,
I thought it would be really interesting to see
that cutout dress that was going to originally
be in a matte fabric be filled with sequins
for the first time for us.
When I told Laura the idea that a cutout dress that is already
something expensive to make was now
going to be filled with sequins, she said, well, you know,
it was great to work with you.
You will definitely be fired after this,
because that's going to be astronomically expensive.
But I did--
You survived.
Every season, I survive.
What I did, though, was I made sure that our merchandising
team, and our sales team had a couple
of versions of that idea, where it's not all over.
So that they can sell that concept
that is going to be photographed in the collection on a sweater,
on a blouse, on a kaftan, something that we have started
to do a lot of at Oscar.
And that's how you make sure that your bases are covered
so that you're not just doing things
that are outlandish or garish.
But you have enough in the showroom to sell.