Isabel
Toledo
‘’ We, the people, decide what is style. This is the most empowering aspect of fashion.’’
Isabel and her family moved from Cuba
to New Jersey when she was 8 years old. She learned how to piece clothes
together, sewing her own school outfits. She mention in an interview that at
young age, she used to be very skinny and tall and she didn’t like the away the
clothes that were out there to buy, looked on her.
“I didn’t think I was going to be a fashion
designer . . .
but I knew I was good with my hands.”
WORK
Isabel attended the Fashion Institute
of Technology in NY and studied
ceramics and costume design at Parsons School of Design (NY).
In her early adulthood, she worked as
intern as an antique-clothing restorer at the Costume Institute at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It was at that point that she gained
the passion for ‘fashion inside out’.
Working fixing the garments for the
exhibitions at the MET, she learned that every designer had their own
signature, their own way to build their garments.
 |
Isabel Toledo for Anne Klein at
NYFW Fall Winter 2007.
|
For more than 20 years, she worked
quietly, earning her space and respect and establishing herself as a very
creative designer who shied away from the mainstream.
Although she has now taken a much
more prominent position in the industry, Toledo continues to work as she always
has, in a fabulously airy multilevel loft in, New York, alongside her husband
and long-time collaborator, the illustrator Ruben Toledo, her childhood
sweetheart.
 |
Isabel Toledo Fashion from Inside
Out Exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NY, 2009.
INFLUENCES
Her
creations brought together her love for the French designer Madeleine Vionnet,
American influences (where fashion is thought of first in terms of comfort),
and her Cuban roots where elegance is primordial.
 
“The Cuban part of my life is probably what
introduced me to my senses." she explained. "It's how I look at
things, the object and the contrast of colour.
The women — I had many Aunts — I
was very comfortable in a women's world."
SIGNATURE
PIECE
At the Inauguration Day in 2009 in NY,
when First Lady of the USA, Michelle Obama wears a lemongrass-yellow garment, by Isabel Toledo, made
of Swiss wool lace, was the day that Isabel’s name became part of history.
Not only putting her on a world stage,
the moment also represented Isabel's appreciation for fashion in relation to
history.
CUT AND CONSTRUCTION
The patterns for Toledo’s
ready-to-wear are as complex and precise as blueprints; terms like “liquid
architecture,” “suspension,” and “origami” have been used to describe
them. Viewed on the body or on a mannequin, a Toledo garment swoops and folds in
beautiful ways.
Despite the
technical rigor of an Isabel Toledo design, the end result is typically soft
and feminine, alluring because of its depth and dimension; “Romantic
Mathematics” is the evocative term she has used to describe her designs. “Don’t
just sketch an idea,” she often say to students . “Think about it in the round,
build it, work it.
   |
