You need an Oscar to be dressed for Oscar de la Renta show

The black-tie hoo-ha dress-to-the-nines gala celebrating “Oscar de la Renta: The Retrospective” — an exhibition that opens at the de Young Museum on March 12 — is a few days before, on March 9. For this occasion, as all the local fashionistas know, “dressing to the nines” means wearing Oscar. The women who wore Gaultier to come to the museum to see Gaultier, and wore Balenciaga to come to the museum to see Balenciaga, will be coming to the museum for Oscar decked out in Oscars.

Last week, Boaz Mazor, de la Renta’s longtime matchmaker of customers and dresses, was presiding over a trunk show at Neiman Marcus. He said he’d sold quite a few Oscars to be worn to the Oscar opening. “Everybody that I have talked to from any level that have come to see me or I have talked to at dinner parties, they are all wearing Oscar,” he said. “Some of them wanted to have the latest, some of them wanted to order from the spring collection. And they wanted to have it ready for the March 9 gala.”

It’s easier, he said, when the customers can fit into the samples, already sewn. “Thank God, people today are small sizes, 0 and size 2. They’re very lucky, they can wear the latest.” Other customers “are preferring to wear Oscars from many years ago, because they feel are honoring Oscar by wearing what he designed.”

Mazor says his brain, however, “is going in every direction,” trying to remember the old dresses so fondly recalled by longtime customers. “I cannot keep track.” And “keeping track” is what he does for most major gown occasions, so as to prevent two women from wearing the same dress. In this case, with people wearing old favorites, it’s very possible that the worst could happen: two ladies wearing the same gown.

“So if they want to compete,” he laughed, “they’ll just have to have a better-looking hairdo and better makeup and better jewelry.” (Note: Considering whether “they want to compete” at such an occasion is like considering whether they (a different “they”) want to compete on the Iowa campaign trail.)

And in Saudi Arabia: The February issue of National Geographic includes Cynthia Gorney of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and photographer Lynsey Addario’s piece about the state of women in Saudi Arabia, the most gender-segregated society in the world.

Some of Gorney’s observations about women’s changing place in Saudi culture — written, of course, after spending time there — are tucked inside a description of her friend Noof Hassan taking her shopping for a new abaya, “the ankle-length covering garment women must wear in Saudi Arabia. ... Abayas in colors are starting to proliferate in Jeddah, the less conservative port city in the west, but in Riyadh a nonblack abaya worn in public still invites scowls from strangers and possible rebuke by the street-patrolling religious police.” Noof takes an abaya trimmed with gray plaid from the closet to show Gorney. It has “pockets, very convenient, a cell phone pocket sewn onto the left sleeve.”

Gorney describes Noof preparing for the excursion, wrapping her black tarha, the long Arabian headscarf, “over her hair and under her chin and once more over her head.” In public, a woman’s scarf is draped over her face. “The cloth was sheer,” writes Gorney, “evidently woven with this purpose in mind, and outside the car windows, things were dimmer and grayer, but visible.”

I’m told that Le Central was closed last Tuesday, Jan. 19, for an all-male private lunch honoring the late Matthew Kelly. The lunch was hosted by Kelly’s widow, Diane Chapman, who greeted about 50 guests, and then left. Among those gathered: Willie Brown, Paul Pelosi, Christopher Caen, Ron George, Jim Ludwig, Bill Harlan and William Hamilton.

This took place, of course, while the same set of people were mourning the death of Wilkes Bashford, who probably provided most of the sport jackets in the room. If there is an afterlife, I’m thinking, Kelly will be relieved to know that with Bashford joining him up there, he won’t have to worry about supplies of pocket squares.

P.S.: In other fashion notes, at the Civic Center BART Station, Norm Vance was listening when the station agent got on the PA system to address someone who must have been a gate-jumper: “You got enough money for that ugly hat, but not for a ticket?”

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“Not many women are under voice control these days.”

Man to man, both of them walking dogs, overheard in North Beach by Gyongy Laky