The story of Cuban-born, self-taught fashion designer Isabel Toledo and artist Ruben Toledo is a rare and captivating tale of pure love, creative synergy and passion intertwined with the vibrant downtown Manhattan scene and the early fashion industry of the 1980s. Mutually inspiring each other’s work, the couple acted as each other’s lifelong muses, exchanging ideas in a continuous flow of unconditional love and artistic collaboration. The exhibition “Isabel Toledo: A Love Letter,” which recently opened at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, is a chance to learn more about this story directly from Ruben Toledo—one of the driving forces behind these exquisite garments.
“When you live, love, and create, you lose sense of time,” he told Observer during our visit to the museum. Isabel Toledo passed away in early 2019 at the age of 59, and Ruben’s mission is to carry on their legacy and share their inspiring story with the world. A documentary is currently in the works, directed by Chiara Clemente, daughter of Francesco Clemente. “She has a special way of telling stories,” Ruben said. The couple first met in an art class at the age of thirteen. They were both Cuban-born immigrants, and the early years were not easy, but for Ruben, it was love at first sight. “I had to build my way through friendship first,” he recalled. “But she loved my art even before me.”
This bond led to a strong partnership based on absolute trust and endless creative exchange. As Ruben describes it, they were inseparable in the creative process. Isabel would conceive an idea, and then Ruben would instinctively sketch it; she would figure out how to bring it to life and then see it through to the finished garment. He likened their collaboration to a dance: “I felt like I could switch and be her, and she felt like she could switch and be me. I call it a dance. You can’t step on each other’s toes when you dance together. Sometimes, you’re leading; sometimes, you let the other lead. It’s about rhythm. It takes a long time to make that magic happen. But when you reach it, you know it in here, man, you do, and you protect it.”
Their pioneering designs emerged from this free-flowing shared creativity, focused on continuous lines that gave the female body freedom of movement, wrapping it in a cocoon-like, structural envelope of grace. This style evokes an entire history of Cuban architecture but can also be likened to a seashell, organically protecting the beauty within. As seen in the selection presented at SCAD, each piece is superbly hand-crafted, featuring original combinations of colors and shapes, making them highly wearable despite the radicality of their construction.
This was the same timeless elegance and class that Isabel herself projected at public events, initially modeling their collections. According to Ruben, Isabel possessed this elegance, sense of style and confidence in her body from the very beginning: “She was a 34-year-old woman in the body of a 13-year-old one when I met her. She would always say: ‘I am a very old soul, and you are a very young one.’” Isabel’s form of class was never loud; it was about being present in a room with a gracious aura, able to either disappear or shine at the center of the stage. “She could have been an artist, she could have been an architect, she could have been a dancer because she has such deep sensitivity and such an observer,” he added. “To me, that’s art, right?”
Of course, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. The couple often had constructive confrontations that pushed them to continuously refine their work. Ruben recalled arguing constructively fairly frequently because they had very different aesthetics. “She would say, ‘I don’t know, Ruben, I think you should stop,’ and I would say, ‘No! I know what I’m doing.’ Then, the minute she left, I would be like, she’s right. And she would be the same with me: I would walk in, and she might be working with some color, and I would say, that’s all you need; you don’t need anything else. She would be like, no, but as soon as I would leave, she would say, you’re right. I understand what you’re saying.” Despite the disagreements, their ability to ground and support each other’s weaknesses while elevating each other’s strengths was what made them such a remarkable team.
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Ruben had already taken his first steps into the fashion world by working with Elio Fiorucci and showcasing some of his art at the store. It was there that he first met Andy Warhol, who encouraged them by saying, “What you’re doing, just do it on a much bigger scale!” Ruben recalled. “We met everyone through Elio, and all our friends working with Elio, like Juan Antonio Lopez, the illustrator, and Juan Ramos, and then Anna Piaget. With this incredible free flow, everyone was invited. You just had to be there, have enthusiasm, and have integrity. That was a big part for you to start. They gave us that opportunity when we were only fifteen or sixteen, and that opened the door to everything.”
Around that time, the artsy couple had to face reality. “We accepted that being bohemian was our condition, but we made the best of it.” Ruben often wished he could provide Isabel with a more sustainable and secure life. “I would say that I wish I were a doctor or a lawyer because your life would have been so much easier. Finally, we made it, but our life was not easy at all in the beginning.” Isabel’s response was to reply that if he’d been a doctor or a lawyer, she never would have married him.
After they married in 1984, Ruben tried different jobs to pay the bills, but eventually, he took the leap and brought their creations directly to shops. They received their first orders immediately, but to succeed, both had to work tirelessly to produce their collections. By the following year, the Toledo brand was already part of New York Fashion Week in 1985, and their pieces were picked up by Barneys New York, Ikram in Chicago, Colette in Paris and Joyce in Hong Kong.
Their business remained family-based even as it grew: “Everything we ever made was made in our studio. Every sewist she taught how to do it her way. It was a tiny studio. My father was the tailor. We ran the business for forty years the way artists run their businesses. We never had a business partner. It was always very homegrown.”
Isabel was already active in the scene—being a talented dancer, she was often seen at Studio 54. However, as Ruben recalled, the couple’s first studio quickly placed them among the incredibly precarious yet authentic creative spirits of that era. “Our first studio was on Times Square, 42nd Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenue,” he said. “Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese was filmed there when we were there. And there’s another movie called Slaves of New York, which was filmed in our building. Our first studio was only $75 a month, but that building was also illegal. At six o’clock, it would close, and to get out, you had to use the fire escape in the back. Basquiat was in that building for a while. It was a real New York story.”
Their next studio carried an even deeper artistic legacy: it was the former studio of Art Kane, a prominent photographer who captured some of the city’s most iconic images. The twelve-story Liberty building from 1985 even had a Greek temple on the roof, plus high ceilings and mosaic floors. But when they went to see the place, it was nothing like they expected inside—Kane had dropped the ceiling and transformed it into a closed-off black box. Their friend, Puerto Rican illustrator Antonio Lopez, insisted they take it anyway. Isabel was already enchanted by it, and they eventually signed the lease. “It was a year-long process; there was a lot of archeology,” Ruben reminisced. That studio became their space to create, love and live, 24 hours a day, in a continuous flow. It remained their creative sanctuary, and then Ruben’s after Isabel passed away, until the pandemic.
Following a difficult period of personal and professional uncertainty, Ruben says Isabel herself seemed to be encouraging him to keep going, even though their production was reduced to theater costumes, which he could still make. But when the pandemic hit, everything changed. The studio lost its vitality, and everything closed down. The women who worked for them didn’t want to commute from Brooklyn or Queens anymore. Eventually, Ruben made the difficult decision to leave that cherished temple of love and creativity that had been their home and the heart of their artistic journey.
Everything the Toledos created and archived was done together, in what Isabel called an explosive mix of “romantic mathematics,” which brought them to the center of the fashion scene and earned them the admiration of designers like Karl Lagerfeld, despite their brand remaining niche. The Toledo name gained widespread recognition when Isabel dressed the new First Lady, Michelle Obama, for her inauguration day, designing a beautifully crafted and classically structured lemongrass dress and matching coat.
But it never mattered who did what or who had the talent for it because, for the Toledos, creation was always shared—they were one. “When you’re artists together, so many people try to break the oyster apart and find out where the pearl is,” Ruben said. “Who made the pearl? To us, it didn’t matter; we both made the pearl. We were an oyster. That’s the secret and the magic. You both make the pearl, and it doesn’t matter who made it: it could be the idea that you started here or the other started there, but it doesn’t matter. The fact that you can make magic that’s so valuable.”
Today, Ruben Toledo’s mission is to share their story and inspire young creatives to believe that fashion design and all forms of artistic creation can still be deeply personal expressions rooted in emotion.
“Isabel Toledo: A Love Letter” is curated by SCAD FASH creative director Rafael Gomes in close collaboration with Ruben Toledo, following its first presentation at SCAD Lacoste. Preceding this, in 2009, the Fashion Institute of Technology dedicated a show to Isabel, and that same year, SCAD presented Isabel and Ruben Toledo with the André Leon Talley Award, which honors exceptional accomplishments in art and design. This exhibition is scheduled to travel further, and Isabel’s work is already part of major museum collections, including the Met’s Costume Institute. A new award named after Isabel has been established by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and was presented for the first time this past November. “This has been part of my mission: I have to keep her name alive because it’s so easy to erase a Latina woman,” Ruben concluded. “We never became a huge business, but we had a great reputation among insiders.” And, we would add, lived a unique and inspiring story worth sharing.
“Isabel Toledo: A Love Letter” is on view at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah through December 26.
