On a February afternoon in 2025, New York Fashion Week was already slipping into the past tense. Inside Oscar de la Renta's Madison Avenue boutique, a piano played beneath the marble staircase. Clients arrived. Buyers circulated. Models wore lace tights, narrow trousers and dresses crowded with flowers. Chloe Popescu, newly appointed chief marketing officer, worked the room among them. She was not treating the presentation as a broadcast. She was tending to the people who made the room matter.
The scene is a tidy introduction to Popescu's career. She has spent years in the connective tissue of culture: between a designer and an audience, a brand and a talent, a glamorous evening and the patient commercial work that gives the evening a reason to exist. Oscar de la Renta did not hire her after a conventional procession through fashion marketing departments. It created its first CMO post for a former talent agent.
This was not a stranger arriving with a PowerPoint and a vocabulary of disruption. At United Talent Agency, Popescu had already advised Oscar de la Renta. She had represented Laura Kim, then one of the house's co-creative directors. The company knew her judgment because it had used it. In February 2025, it changed her seat at the table.
A reporter's eye, an agent's address book
Popescu studied journalism at The George Washington University. Before UTA, she worked at William Morris Endeavor. She joined UTA in 2014 and stayed for roughly a decade, eventually leading brand consulting for its luxury practice. An Advertising Week biography from 2023 described her as one of the founding agents of UTA Fashion, the division built to represent luxury brands, designers and fashion figures.
The client list explains the range. Byredo and Baccarat. Toteme and Monse. The OTB portfolio, including Jil Sander, Marni and Maison Margiela. PS, the private terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. Oscar de la Renta itself. Popescu's stated expertise covered original marketing programs, business development, strategic partnerships, relationship building and talent acquisition. The grammar of the job was less about buying attention than arranging useful proximity.
At UTA, fashion sat beside Hollywood, sport, music, media and technology. That position gave an agent a peculiar education. A brand could no longer be understood as a sequence of seasonal images delivered to editors. It also lived in whom it dressed, which room it entered, what it helped create and whether the relationship lasted after the cameras left.
There is a family echo in that appetite for story. Popescu is the daughter of Romanian-American novelist and filmmaker Petru Popescu and was born in Beverly Hills. Her own professional biography, however, has been built in rooms where the story is rarely the only product. A narrative has to survive negotiation, budgets, personalities and time zones. An agent learns that charm may open a door, but follow-through is what keeps the room.
The house that became the client that became the job
Oscar de la Renta's decision to bring Popescu in-house followed years of working together. Chief executive Alex Bolen said she had brought creativity and clear thinking to the development of the company's strategies. Her appointment gave her responsibility for marketing and content strategy, partnerships and new category development. She would split her time between New York and Los Angeles, a bicoastal arrangement suited to a job at the junction of fashion and entertainment.
The remit is broad because the house's marketing is broad. Oscar de la Renta is an independent American luxury company with a heritage in ready-to-wear, bridal, accessories and fragrance. Its dresses appear on red carpets, but its economics do not resemble those of European conglomerates built on vast accessories businesses. The company has leaned into celebrity dressing and direct relationships with clients while stepping away from the standard rhythm of public runway shows and collection reviews.
Popescu arrived inside that choice. Her agency background fit a model in which relationships are infrastructure. At the Madison Avenue presentation shortly after her appointment, the guest list included clients, celebrity friends and retail partners. The atmosphere aimed for a cocktail party at home, albeit a home with a marble staircase and rather more caviar than most refrigerators can explain.
The expansion of the brand's connection to culture and content is uniquely exciting, not solely for me in this new role but most importantly for the ODLR customer.Chloe Popescu, on joining Oscar de la Renta
The final words are the tell: the ODLR customer. Culture can become a vague corporate incantation, summoned whenever a campaign lacks a plot. Popescu describes it as a connection that must matter to someone specific. Her old job supplied the map of people and moments. Her new one requires deciding where the house should travel on that map.
Blood, sweat, tears and a very good dress
A year before taking the CMO role, Popescu spoke to Vogue at UTA's pre-Met Gala gathering. She described the months of work behind bespoke looks and praised designers Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia for continuing to show up with passion and joy. Her formulation included “blood, sweat, and tears,” language with more workshop grit than velvet-rope sparkle.
She also called the Met Gala the most important red carpet of the year and urged attendees to “really go for it.” Both remarks reveal the useful duality in her work. Fashion's cultural occasions depend on fantasy, but the fantasy is manufactured through fittings, calendar changes, negotiation and labor. The public sees a few seconds on the museum steps. The agent sees the months behind them.
That understanding traveled with her to Oscar. At UTA, she had helped Laura Kim turn an unexpected pandemic identity as a home cook into opportunities including a Crate & Barrel partnership. The project was not a random celebrity endorsement pasted onto a designer. It began with something Kim was genuinely doing and let a partnership grow from it. Relevance worked because the relationship made narrative sense.
The principle is stealable: begin with the person's actual behavior, then build the brand expression around it. In a market crowded with borrowed fame, coherence can feel almost radical. It also ages better than a stunt.
This is the night to really go for it.Chloe Popescu, on the Met Gala
The party as a piece of strategy
By early 2026, Popescu's work at Oscar de la Renta was appearing in a series of rooms. In Santo Domingo, she joined company leaders around events celebrating the house's Dominican heritage. In New York, she helped devise a Super Bowl gathering with Puck that cheerfully crossed fashion and sport. There were models carrying diamante footballs, branded foam fingers, margaritas in red cups and a guacamole station. CEO Alex Bolen put caviar on soft serve, a gesture that may be the shortest available explanation of high-low luxury.
The details sound playful because they were. They were also precise. A party can be content, customer care, relationship maintenance and brand theater at once. It creates images, certainly, but also shared memories among editors, clients and partners. Popescu's agency years trained her to see a guest list as something more than names in columns. Each person arrives with a network, a point of view and a reason to remember whether the evening felt human.
This is where the agent-to-operator transition becomes interesting. Advisers can recommend the room. Operators must pay for it, staff it, defend it and connect it to tomorrow morning's work. Popescu's appointment made her accountable for the afterlife of the idea.
A career built in the middle
Popescu's public profile is more professional than confessional. What emerges comes from the architecture of her work: long tenures, overlapping relationships and a tendency to occupy the middle between creative ambition and commercial execution. She represented Kim before joining Kim's house. She consulted for Oscar before becoming its executive. She built a luxury practice within an entertainment agency, then brought entertainment's relationship logic into a luxury company.
The middle can look unglamorous on an org chart. In practice, it is where translation happens. Designers speak in silhouette and craft. Executives speak in margin and growth. Talent speaks in identity and audience. Customers speak with attention, affection and purchases. Someone has to hear all four without flattening any of them.
Oscar de la Renta gave that translation a C-suite title for the first time. Popescu's next chapter will be measured in the things marketing always must eventually face: whether new categories make sense, whether partnerships deepen the brand, whether content serves the customer, whether events turn acquaintance into loyalty. The dresses still have to do the difficult work of being desired.
Yet there is something clean about the premise. A heritage house does not need to behave like a museum, and it need not perform youth by chasing every new platform. It can invite the right people in, make something memorable with them and let the story travel at human speed. Popescu has spent her career learning who belongs in that room. Now she helps decide what happens once the doors close.