Who Is Isabel Toledo?

In this interview, pulled from PAPER's September 2003 issue, PAPER editor interviews Isabel and Ruben Toledo on the marriage of art and fashion.

Ruben and Isabel Toledo make beautiful music together. After designing clothes for two decades, Isabel has become one of America's most-respected fashion creatives (who surely will end up in the history books). And Ruben's artwork (illustrations, paintings and sculpture) has become some of the most coveted and collected in the fashion industry and beyond. But what most people don't know is that they literally create their work together. Isabel feels a garment, tells Ruben about it, and he articulates it for her on paper. Ruben dreams of executing a painting, and Isabel mixes the colors he wants to see in it.

The Toledos have been married for nearly 20 years now. As children, they both immigrated from Cuba to West New York, New Jersey, where they met as teenagers. Isabel confesses, "Ruben visualized his wife at 13 years old and it was me. He had braces." Says Ruben: "She wouldn't look at me for five years, but she finally came around." And the rest is history.

I first met Ruben in the mid-'80s, when I visited a SoHo shop in which he worked. We ended up talking about shoes. He told me, "My girlfriend, whom I'm going to marry, lives in Jersey and has the best shoe collection. Oh, and she makes beautiful clothes. When we get married, I'll invite you to dinner." And one hot summer night there I was, sharing a Cuban meal with this lovely couple in their walk-up tenement studio behind Port Authority. For dessert, they opened their only closet and began lugging out stuff: Ruben's paintings and Isabel's clothes. I was floored by what I saw that night and have followed, collected and avidly written about their work ever since.

I've watched this brilliant couple struggle to remain independent for many years and eventually grow and achieve great success on their own quirky terms. Isabel sells only to private clients and a handful of stores. Barneys committed to the designer in 1993 and has sold her work ever since, developing a strong customer base. It also helped that the clothes were usually snapped up off the racks as fast as she could produce them. Not only have they seduced the fashion world -- who can't resist their style, elegance, fashion ideas and the hilarious spoofing of themselves seen in Ruben's artwork -- but they have gained enormous respect from those who count, from museum curators to major designers.

Julie Gilhart, women's fashion director of Barneys New York, says, "Isabel has a dialogue with a woman's body. She studies it on herself. She is her customer. The Toledos show how success can be achieved in a beautiful and different way. They are my gurus." Geoffrey Beene calls Isabel a "major talent," and claims "Isabel Toledo is one of the secrets of American fashion."

The Toledos had never been to Las Vegas, so I thought it would be fun to shock and inspire them by bringing them west on our fashion tour and interviewing them both about their work and careers. As these two are usually attached at the hip, one never without the other, I decided to separate them and speak to them alone about one another. We also asked both of them to produce a Las Vegas inspiration for the issue in their mediums. The results are fascinating.

Ladies first. Isabel enters solo.

Kim Hastreiter: When did you first pick up a needle and thread?

Isabel Toledo: I got all the hand-me-downs of my sisters. I was such an individual; I wanted the clothes to be mine, so I'd change them. I cut the bottoms off shirts where the hem was and wrapped that cord around my body so the shirt would taper in and the sleeves would be big.

KH: When did you start inventing clothes from scratch?

IT: My mother tricked me into learning to sew. After my older sister got a job, my mother convinced us to take sewing classes. Really, it was a babysitter, but I took it seriously and learned to sew.

KH: How do you describe what you do?

IT: I don't. It's like describing my insides, and I've never looked at my insides.

KH: Were you always a visual person?

IT: I'm not a visual person.

KH: How can you say you're not a visual person? Your aesthetic is so strong.

IT: I'm not, I swear. I have it all in my head, but I don't visualize it. I feel, feel, feel. I come up with a vocabulary, but I'm not visual.

KH: But look at your color sense.

IT: Yes, but colors are emotion. I react to emotion with color. Besides I'm married to Ruben, who's totally visual. He sees everything.

KH: Your work seems to be influenced by geometry or architecture.

IT: Architecture to me is flat if you look at it from afar, until you enter the building. Then it's 3-D. I like space, the feeling of space. It might be a curve on the wall that makes me think of a curve in a garment. I was always fascinated by clothing patterns; that was architecture to me. I could imagine how those flat patterns would just fall onto my body thinking, "Wow this could be a dress." I think I was more influenced by the patterns than by the clothes.

KH: And the fabric. You've used a lot of burlap.

IT: Burlap lined in voile, denim lined in satin.

KH: So you mix humble and luxury.

IT: Yin and yang. Burlap is hard, rough, and then the voile is soft. If anything is really true to me, it's opposites. That's what keeps me interested. Ruben and I are opposites. Ruben is a visual person; I am not. I love surprise, unlike Ruben, who can do the same thing every day.

KH: Do you design clothes separately from Ruben?

IT: Absolutely not. He has no choice but to be a part of it, because I talk to him about what I feel as I design. Then Ruben puts it on paper.

KH: Give me an example of how you describe something to Ruben.

IT: I might say, "I want to feel the line yanking underneath my arm," or "I want tension here. I want this to be a huge garment, but make sure it fits beautifully on the neck as well as on the bottom of the sleeve. I want to feel the air between that huge garment and me." And he'll draw it. I have a library of sketches, or what I call our constant conversation.

KH: Does he ever contribute to the designs?

IT: Of course he does. He's visualizing my feelings. Even the mistakes are food for me. If I make a dress that's totally ugly, I know that it is going to have babies. I have enough confidence in my work to know that there's never a bad line.

KH: It's funny, because people always assume the two of you are exactly the same, like one person, but you're complete opposites.

IT: Again, the yin and the yang. Even in our taste in food. I love bland food; he's got to have spice.

KH: You play ball with each other, throwing ideas back and forth, and each time they get bigger and bigger. What a collaboration! Has a similar creative love team ever before existed?

IT: I can only imagine that perhaps Ray and Charles Eames were like this. I am sure that she had something to do with absolutely everything he did. I can tell. There's always a soft and a hard in their work.

KH: Let's talk about the feeling of your clothes. They feel of comfort but also of a certain formality.

IT: That's because I manipulate women's posture in my designs.

KH: You always stand quite erect yourself with amazing posture. What is it about your clothes that always make women stand up straight and hold their head a certain way? It's so elegant.

IT: I know where to put those seams. Also, a lot of my work is about elongating the neck. I do a lot of seams from the bust to the neck to under the arm to your back. Actually, it's like carrying a backpack . . . so you stand up straight. I do a lot of waists, so you hold in your stomach, giving you a straight back.

KH: You also put pockets in everything.

IT: Yeah, because that gives body language. Certain gestures of the body give a person real elegance.

KH: Do you have inspirations?

IT: My husband. Really.

KH: Were you inspired by our fun trip to Las Vegas?

IT: Yeah! I loved Las Vegas.

KH: So if you did a showgirl outfit . . .

IT: I would have to get into the emotion of a showgirl to tell you what I would dress her in. I would have to first feel what that woman is feeling. I might want to put certain things right between her crack so that it has emotion.

Isabel leaves the room, and Ruben enters.

KH: Is it true when you got off the boat from Cuba, they gave you a pair of ladies go-go boots to wear?

Ruben Toledo: Yeah, I came from Cuba when I was six, and we were given immigrant clothes donated by the church. So we wore the strangest combinations -- go-go boots and Eskimo jackets.

KH: Did your schoolbooks always have drawings in them?

RT: I was always drawing. In school, I failed everything you could imagine, even art. I couldn't follow orders. If they said, "Go left," I would go right.

KH: And then you met Isabel.

RT: Yeah, and my life changed completely. I was 13, she was 14. I had messed-up hair, pimples and a missing front tooth I was a bad-looking kid and a bad kid. I would sit right behind her and pull her hair.

KH: Were you making art in high school?

RT: I never knew what art was in those days. Or whether it's a sculpture made out of a Kleenex box on top of an avocado pit and a toothpick.

KH: Isabel just told me she is not a visual person, which shocked me.

RT: She couldn't care less about how things look. She knows how they feel.

KH: I don't understand that. I look at how beautifully Isabel puts herself together, I look at her gorgeous clothing, I go to your beautiful house, and you're telling me that has nothing to do with Isabel?

RT: To her, how stuff looks is only the outcome of everything that came before. She always says, "I don't have a vision of something." While on the other hand, I'm the other way around. I literally have visions or shapes that just appear to me. As I'm talking to you, I see a shape come out and fly towards me. I'm either insane or kind of a mystic, but things appear, and then I can't get them out of my mind. She's the opposite. She arrives at shapes based on the construction of a thought or how something is made or feels. It's really from the inside out.

KH: So it's like a sixth sense.

RT: The final visual form, what we see, is the last thing on her agenda. For her it's a whole alchemy, a feeling, a mood. Some-times it takes me weeks to figure out why she did something, and then I totally get it. It's not obvious.

KH: You are her translator. She communicates these feelings to you, and you draw them.

RT: I kind of do the shorthand. She may say, "Oh no, you got it completely wrong, but I love this thing." So mistakes lead to other things.

KH: So that's the tumbleweed method of how Isabel's little babies happen. Now what's the tumbleweed method of how your art happens? Does Isabel help you with your work?

RT: Absolutely. I like the unexplained and she's totally logical. When I make a sculpture, it wouldn't stand for five minutes if she didn't figure out how to keep it upright. She's also much more focused and practical than I am. And she loves the "accident." I've learned from her to give in to that. I used to think that it's about finding the perfect color or piece of paper, and she's like, "No, whatever's around." If there are only three things left in the refrigerator, she'll snap together a beautiful meal out of them.

KH: You are so lucky. The two of you are like a symphony; it's like this music you make together. In all your paintings, every woman has Isabel's face. What is it about her face?

RT: It's her eyes: They're so mystical. They're like looking into some other world. There's so much soul in her eyes. It's like a poem that you can't quite understand, ever. It's all about mystery. And she always keeps it, you know. She breathes mystery. It's not about explaining everything; it is about letting it be a mystery. I love that.

KH: The two of you also have this great independence from all rules of business or career.

RT: It's a blessing to be an immigrant. I always think if we have kids, we're going to move to another country just so they can be immigrants too, 'cause there's a freedom in not having preconceived rules of how things are done or what's expected of you. We had no clue. We just made it up as we went along. That's real freedom. My parents were great because they were new to this country too, so they didn't know what American kids were supposed to do. We would do outrageous stuff and say, "This is America. Kids are supposed to do this here." And they'd be like, "Oh, okay. I guess this is America."

KH: What kind of things?

RT: Like going out and not coming home for three days and nights, missing school. We told them this was normal in America. And they believed us. We were left alone to grow up like wild weeds.

KH: So how do you describe what you do now?

RT: Storytelling. As simple as that. People tell stories all around us, and so much of it is about confusion. They think they're talking about one thing when they're really talking about something else. It's about the confusion of life when everybody thinks they're on the same page, but they are so not.

KH: I think you would be a great political cartoonist.

RT: I don't have the attention span for politics. Maybe that's why I love fashion. Fashion was an accident, but I love how fast it is, and I love how nonjudgmental it is. I mean, I grew up next to Isabel, basically, and she is my model. If she wants to put Popsicle sticks on her head and put a Hawaiian lei on herself, it would be beautiful. That's fearlessness.

KH: To me, one of your great talents is humor. You are completely hilarious.

RT: Life is pretty absurd if you think about it. Maybe it comes from being an immigrant from Cuba and not knowing who the hell I am. To me America was some big scary movie. I'd never seen a naked tree before. In Cuba we don't have trees with no leaves. I came here, and everything was like a Dracula movie with all the trees naked and freaky, and the sky was gray. Everything was like on TV. Someone took us to see Night of the Living Dead at a drive-in movie behind a supermarket in New Jersey the first week we arrived from Cuba. It was really fucking scary. America was like Land of the Scary, like Dracula's theme park. I was in heaven.

KH: So the Paper trip to Las Vegas must have been fun for you?

RT: Yeah, I was waiting for the giant tarantula to come over the mountains--in an optimistic way, of course.

Photo Assistant: Jennifer Rocholl, Hair: Danilo for Daniloworld, Hair assistant: Mia at Magnet L.A., Makeup by James Vincent for Pretty Pretty Cosmetics with Aja Roberts.

Check out an interview with Isabel Toledo about her dress designed for Michelle Obama on PAPERMAG.com!