News have just spread about the untimely death of fashion and costume designer Isabel Toledo and our thoughts go to her family and friends and in particular to her husband Ruben. An obituary will follow, but, in the meantime, we would like to remember her with a quote from Dr. Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at FIT, taken from an interview we did in 2009 about the exhibition "Isabel Toledo: Fashion from the Inside Out".
"I think that what makes Isabel a real 'designer's designer' and an interesting artist to people who are into fashion is the fact that she is so independent and she's always kind of experimenting. Her patterns are not ordinary patterns. She knows how ordinary patterns work and she has been working with them since she was eight years old, but she will ignore them. She wouldn't put in a sleeve the way other people put in a sleeve, so she just experiments, which means that very often she needs to explain her work, because people have never seen anything like that. She jokes saying that her clothes always sell out at Barneys, partly because her clients buy them and her production is small, and partly because manufacturers of other designers buy them and try to take them apart to figure out how she gets certain effects, because she does things in a new way. That's the most interesting aspect of her work."
Comments