Peter Copping’s appointment as the successor to Oscar de la Renta was announced to the world last year on Oct. 13. Seven days later, Mr. de la Renta died.rn
Mr. Copping.”
The first day of Peter Copping’s new job at a new brand in a new country did not go exactly as planned.
Instead of going to the offices of Oscar de la Renta on 42nd Street across from the leafy gardens of Bryant Park and taking his place in a glass-fronted office next to Mr. de la Renta, the designer who had recently named Mr. Copping his first-ever creative director and heir, Mr. Copping found himself at a pew in the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue, behind Donna Karan and somewhere in the vicinity of Michael Kors and Tory Burch, attending Mr. de la Renta’s memorial service.
Instead of listening to the studio assistants Andrea Ruiz and Fernando Garcia brief him on the fall pre-collection, he was listening to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg honor Mr. de la Renta.
And instead of watching the well-dressed women walking by his office on their way to lunch at the Lambs Club, he was watching Laura Bush, Charlie Rose and Diane Sawyer walking down the aisle shrouded in black.
“That,” said the 48-year-old Briton, “is when I truly understood the magnitude of what I had taken on.”
On his shoulders lies not just the future of a brand deeply embedded in the political, media and celebrity power structure of a country, but a new fashion paradigm.
Fashion is notoriously bad at succession planning: Its history is littered with stories of designers who sold their companies without naming their heirs and were unhappy with the results, from Hubert de Givenchy to Yves Saint Laurent, or whose brands fell apart after their death through lack of foresight (Halston, Bill Blass). At Oscar de la Renta, however, for arguably the first time, a designer had consciously tried to change the narrative.
“Our industry has not always done the best job when it comes to changes in design leadership,” Mr. de la Renta said last October in announcing the appointment of Mr. Copping, a designer who had spent his entire career in Europe, much of it at Louis Vuitton under Marc Jacobs and then at Nina Ricci. “My hope is that, in leading this selection and actively participating in the transition, I can ensure the right design future for our company and brand.”
While Mr. de la Renta did not live to see the results, given the number of other major brands currently run by an aging generation of big names, from Giorgio Armani to Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan, all eyes will be on Mr. Copping’s debut show on Tuesday, calculating whether or not the house of de la Renta has pulled it off.
If it does, it could become a new model for the industry. If it doesn’t, simply another cautionary tale.
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“No cellphones when we are doing fittings,” he said. “It drives me crazy: Are you here with us or on Instagram? If you need to take a break to check it, fine. But when you are here, you need to be fully present.
“They are not things I ever would have done if Oscar was around,” he acknowledged. “I would have just slipped in and worked in his way.”
Mr. de la Renta’s team — the only new person Mr. Copping has hired is a knitwear designer from Nina Ricci, to fill an opening that already existed — is adjusting. The fact that Mr. de la Renta chose Mr. Copping, and that Mr. de la Renta was known internally to have “great instincts about people,” according to Mr. Mazor, has made them less resistant to the changes, more willing to extend to Mr. Copping the benefit of the doubt.
Besides, Mr. Bolen said, “we had forgotten what it was like to have a head designer here Monday to Friday.” Because of his illness, Mr. de la Renta had been a sporadic presence for the last season.
“I’m going to do it my own way,” Mr. Copping said. For example, “don’t expect me to sing” (a reference to Mr. de la Renta’s reputation as a public crooner).
“It would be quite futile to compete with his memory,” he continued. “But in the few months I’ve been here, I have gone to more events than in the last five years in Paris.”
As for the clothes themselves: “They will be sophisticated and feminine, but I am also interested in what that means for day. For the office. Not just the red carpet. America is still a society where people dress up and go to charity functions, but not all the world is like that. Sometimes, just by putting pockets in a specific place, you create a new attitude. One that’s a little cooler.”
Mr. Bolen is guardedly optimistic. “I don’t know if it will work,” he said. “But what I have seen looks very pretty. We’ll know soon enough.”
The lights come up Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.
A version of this article appears in print on February 15, 2015, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: Keeping the Name Alive. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
