When Oscar de la Renta died last week, the world became a less splashy place and is now much the poorer for it. Couture’s default reverted to cool; colour intensity dialled back a good few notches; flair slunk away, embarrassed. I realised that one reason I liked him so much was because, though they were positioned at opposite ends of the fashion universe, Oscar’s peacock flamboyance, ruffles and swags, the lines that swayed and billowed, shook and flounced, reminded me subconsciously of my father.

In the greige 1950s, the models’ cheekbones were as sharp as cutters’ shears and the New Look cinched waists and shoulder-pads came, like everything else, in dim tones: mulligatawny browns, the soot-black of the blitzed city. But when Arthur Schama went hunting for fabric in a Lancashire which still had loom sheds (and took the small Simon with him), he was after a jolt of radiance. If the sun wouldn’t shine through the April drizzle, his silks and rayons in coral cobalt and marigold bloody well would, and for a time they did. “Go on, do yourself a favour, have a swish,” my dad would say when a tall woman tried on a number made from his maharaja taffeta. Usually, she did, because wherever she came from, at that moment she felt like a million dollars.

This was pretty much Oscar’s mission in life, too. Of course, to many of his clients a million dollars was chump change. But without ever pretending that he was high-street, Oscar aimed to make any women wearing his dresses feel unafraid to be high-coloured Caribbean blooms. His secret was the marriage of warmth with elegance. In the Dominican Republic, his catlike smile grew bigger with a walk through the orchid garden. Oscar surgically unpeeling a perfect soursop for breakfast was a study in tropical happiness. Though his famously beautiful ties supplied the high colour to set off the dove-grey suits, at Punta Cana dinners his shirt, slacks and shoes ran the gamut from cream to ivory. With the coffee, a small band would magically make an appearance and Oscar would sing with them in a honeyed tenor. Occasionally there would be some dancing and this, too, he performed with liquid elegance. Swish, sway and croon.