Oscar de la Renta collection sizzles at Lake Tahoe fashion show

For decades, event designer Stanlee Gatti has been able to proclaim that there are two things in life he’s never experienced: smoking pot and attending the annual Saks Fifth Avenue fashion show in support of the League to Save Lake Tahoe.

Now he’s down to just one. Gatti, along with pretty much every other fashion-forward enviro in the Bay Area recently beelined to the sandy shores outside railroad industrialist and tycoon Kern Schumacher’s Incline Village crib for the presentation of Oscar de la Renta designer Peter Copping’s 2016 resortcollection. Saks Fifth Avenue has produced the fashion show for all 46 of its years.

And, though Copping had yet to dip a toe into the lake’s shimmering blue waters, the former Nina Ricci designer was delighted with his inaugural turn-out, raising a record-breaking $862K in support of the league’s education and environmental programs to protect the Tahoe tides and shoreline.

Organized by co-chairwomen Edith Tobin, Barbara Brown and Jessica Hickingbotham, the afternoon included an al fresco lunch but, following last summer’s scorching rays, Brown made a tweak to this year’s menu: water pitchers were frozen ahead of time so they’d keep cool throughout the day.

Event designer J. Riccardo Benavides followed suit, adding muslin swags to a shade structure shielding dining tables and a 60-foot-long catwalk set near the lapping lake.

Among the lake lovers: Copping’s husband, floral designer Rambert Rigaud; League loyalist Dolph Andrews; Fine Arts Museums board president Dede Wilsey with her family, Katie and Todd Traina and their daughter, Daisy; Saks VP/GM Robert Arnold-Kraft; Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer; Stuart and Gina Peterson with their daughter, Lucy; League board president Ash Daggs; Warren and Sally Debenham; Komal Shah, Joe Tobin and his pal, Robert Bloomingdale (waving the flag for his mom, loyal ODLR fan and friend, Betsy Bloomingdale); Maureen and Craig Sullivan; Jay Hickingbotham and his sister, Darayan Hickingbotham (whose late grandmother, Diana Dollar Knowles, long reigned as Tahoe’s grand dame), former Facebooker Libby Leffler, who was assessing ensembles for the study halls of Harvard University, Bulgari store manager Daniel Diaz; Stephanie Marver and her daughter, Carissa Ejabat, who modeled pieces from the ODLR children’s line; and Boaz Mazor, the dashing ODLR aide-de-camp who wields his tape-measure like a conductor’s baton.

Yet this festive summer day — a muggy 86 — was not without a wisp of wistfulness: the late, beloved designer Oscar de la Renta made one of his final public appearances at last year’s Tahoe show.

“It’s been a very difficult, emotional year for our family and the company, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it’s difficult to stand here without Oscar,” admitted ODLR CEO Alex Bolen, who is married to de la Renta’s stepdaughter, Eliza Reed Bolen.

“Oscar hand-picked Peter as his successor and was very excited for his arrival. My great regret is that they didn’t have more time to work together,” Bolen continued. “But because of Peter’s great work and good friendship, that’s allowed our family to grieve and adjust to life without Oscar.”

Bolen was prescient in describing Copping as, “no slouch when it comes to fashion design.” The 610-strong crowd cheered wildly as Copping’s flouncy femme yet modernist fashions sashayed along the catwalk.

The fete also featured a Christie’s-led live auction that sparked dueling bids for the ODLR Fashion Week package with Copping. But Bolen boldly added a second lot and sold the experience twice, at $52K per package.

In spite of the soaring mercury and a legion of new fans who, post-show, swarmed the designer to place their orders in Saks’ steamy sales tent, Copping remained cool as a cucumber.

“This is quite novel for me as this is the first show I’ve ever done where people have arrived in paddle boats and canoes. So that’s a kind of new audience,” he said with a laugh. “But the show does have some competition and that competition is the lake. When I arrived here I was blown away with its beauty. The reason that we’re here is to raise money to keep this lake blue. And that’s a good thing by me.”

Catherine Bigelow is The San Francisco Chronicle’s society correspondent. E-mail: missbigelow@sfgate.com