This couture cape in peach paduasoy and the sequin and crystal embroidered chiffon gown are both from Jeanne Lanvin, circa 1961. The cape, at least, is attributed to Oscar Renta Fiallo, who that year left his apprenticeship with Cristóbal Balenciaga to work with Antonio del Castillo, the Spanish designer brought to Paris to revive Lanvin. Both garments belonged to Baroness Aino de Bodisco.
I had to look up paduasoy, which is maybe a Spanish term for peau de soie, a variant of silk satin. Which is absolutely the least important thing in this situation. Because the auction listing of these two items also includes a copy of the mindboggling, handwritten pledge the 24-year-old man who would become known as Oscar de la Renta made to Bodisco in June 1956.
It is absolutely my own free will and decision to put on legal terms, valid in all countries in the world, my personal engagement in our agreement, where by I, Oscar Orlis de la Renta Fiallo, will give you, Aino Pusta van Wagenberg, at all times and during all my life, and by will and testament after my death, one half of all my possessions, incomes and earnings, starting on this day of Thursday, June the 22nd of 1956 in Madrid.
This engagement from me to you, to be permanent and unchangeable agreement regardless of our personal relationship or legal status as unmarried, married, divorced or widowed
Madrid Junio 22, 1956
Oscar Renta Fiallo
The agreement was notarized by the consul at the US embassy a week later, on June 28th.
The date is significant. Though she was cropped out of the picture that ran in the LIFE magazine cover story, Bodisco, then 47 and used to diplomatic circles, was in the photoshoot where it happened when Oscar got his big break: dressing Beatrice Lodge, the 18-yo daughter of John Cabot Lodge, Eisenhower’s ambassador to Franco’s Spain, for her debutante coming out party at the embassy, in June 1956.
According to Rogue’s Gallery, Michael Gross’s gossipy 2009 history of the Metropolitan Museum, Bodisco did far more than stand around while Oscar zhuzhed the tulle. She got him to switch from painting to fashion. She kept him alive, and kept him, giving him an apartment, food, and money. She wore a dress he designed to a US embassy party, where Lodge admired it, borrowed it, and commissioned more, including the debutante gown. She cannot have had anything to do with LIFE’s coverage, which seems like a weird soft power adjunct to whatever the US agenda was at the moment. But it seems easy to imagine that as she saw the media momentum build, Bodisco feeling the need to lock in her investment.
Their relationship lasted through their move to Paris in 1961 for Lanvin, but de la Renta broke with Bodisco the next year after moving to New York to design for Elizabeth Arden. [According to Gross, using the ‘de la’ was de Bodisco’s idea.] Gross quotes Bosidsco’s brutal self-own in a letter to the Lodges: “The moment he received a livable salary, he dropped me.” [Pay your interns, you monsters.]
As he became more successful, she sporadically tried to collect her share. He gave her clothes for a few years; he flew her to Marbella for lunch in 1973, and told her he could only pay her in dresses, which she accepted until breaking with him at his Christmas party in 1976.
In 1979 Bodisco hired Roy f’ing Cohn to sue de la Renta for $2 million. The 1981 wire service report of the lawsuit’s dismissal noted that de la Renta “had use of a cooperative apartment in Manhhattan, a house in Connecticut and a house in his native Dominican Republic.” So it seems like this agreement might have helped him renounce his attachment to possessions, incomes, and earnings—and to keep his assets out of his own name.
Gross’s main source for Aido de Bodisco lore seems to be her “sole heir, Jonathan Rogers Clark,” an artist/dealer who showed at a gallery in Marbella and New York called “Aino Art.” Clark shared a book proposal with Gross for “an intimate biography” of de la Renta which described the twice-divored Bodisco in Madrid as “alone, rich, rattling around in a grand old palazzo and just waiting for a 23 year old handsome man in need.”
Except she wasn’t alone in 1956; she had $500 month and sole custody of her 10yo daughter, after divorcing her second husband, Andre van Wagenberg, in 1952. The dates in Clark’s book proposal don’t match, so I’m gonna use the ones in the lawsuit Bodisco filed in New York 1963 to get her ex-husband in Maryland to pay for their daughter’s medical treatments for infantile paralysis [polio?], which she contracted in 1954.
That case did go to the US Supreme Court, btw, but only because the ex claimed moving out of state exempted him from honoring his legal obligation to pay for his daughter’s health care. The court found in the baroness’s favor in 1966.
The more I dug on this contract/will thing, the more I felt the complicated and quiet desperation of Bodisco’s circumstances. Right up until she hired Roy Cohn.
I don’t have any neat ending. On the one hand, this is an ancient oddity involving none of anyone’s business. On the other, these are actually the people involved in shaping the world, city, politics, art, fashion, and society we’ve all been stuck with. In 2016 Dede Wilsey’s de Young Museum staged a retrospective of de la Renta’s work, curated by André Leon Talley. Nina Leen’s photo of the Lodge fitting is the first image. Wilsey’s father was Eisenhower’s ambassador to Austria, and her son was Trump’s.
[next day update: I started with the title, “The Triumph Over The Will,” and then changed it. Only by posting about it on bluesky did I realize the title could have been, “Oscar de la Rent Boy.” After a day of talking about this story with people, I think that would have been more catchy than accurate, so I’ve made my peace.]
Couture Lanvin Castillo Garments from the Estate of the Baroness de Bodisco [augusta-auction]