This world premiere of Oscar de la Renta’s retrospective celebrates the life and career of one of fashion’s most influential designers. The exhibition installation includes more than 130 ensembles produced over five decades and is presented in collaboration with his house and the designer’s family.

Commissioned to design the exhibition, kdA followed the narrative arc established by the museum and the curators, developing an installation that reads as set design for a dramatic production—the “actors”, draped in his designs and frozen in space, are observed in the round while the audience moves throughout the exhibit. One of the design challenges was the uniform scale of the pieces on exhibit, as even the most exciting fashion design, when viewed at once, can look like a police lineup of the impeccably dressed. To shift the atmosphere, snowflake-shaped pedestals create varying viewing angles and place each dress in an “end of the runway” setting.

Nine themes span seven rooms and feature designs from his early works and Spanish influence through to his ballroom and iconic red-carpet work. The exhibit opens with an abstract, Mad Men-like cityscape, populated with ready-to-wear fashion for the emerging office culture. Several models inhabit the first room, setting the stage for this retrospective of a prolific designer. A gold leaf sunrise and sunset forms the backdrop for day and evening-wear collections and leads to a vestibule in the following room of Spanish influenced design, dominated by a fragment of John Singer Sargent’s The Flamenco Dancers. In another gallery, Makovsky’s The Russian Bride’s Attire is playfully enlarged and wrapped in an elaborate frame, setting the artist’s figures at the same scale as the dresses immediately in front. The Garden Room centers on a video shot at De La Renta’s Connecticut estate.

A veil of laser-cut leaves lines the walls, invoking the atmosphere of the outdoors with views into a tableaux of the influential fashion photographers Cecil Beaton and Steven Meisel. The exhibit concludes in the Ballroom, imagined as a fragmented and geometric Hall of Mirrors, with reflective Mylar shaped like the pedestals supporting the work.