.lenadunham remembers the imagination, bravery, and depth of feeling of Isabel Toledo.
, whose designs stood out in a trend-based, heat-chasing culture as, well, timeless. Structured yet improvisational, professional yet undeniably odd. Isabel created from a place of singularity.
She said early on that she started designing because, as a young Cuban transplant to New Jersey, she could find nothing to wear. Ruben Toledo, whom she met in high school and who would later become her creative partner and husband, remembers her refusal to blend: smudging colors on her eyes, confounding the other kids. It makes sense that, as young collaborators in late 1970s New York, they would take refuge from a storm in the Fiorucci store and meet Joey Arias and Andy Warhol in one pop.
Growing up in downtown Manhattan, it wasn’t unusual to see women whose fashion choices were provocative and confounding. A Stepford blonde in baggy men’s suiting with heart-shaped coral lips. An alt aerobics teacher who sliced and diced her spandex. A ceramicist in Issey Miyake Pleats Please and a homemade woolen hat. My mother Laurie Simmons in her pistachio wool Isaac Mizrahi tracksuit, henna’d hair flying.
For weeks afterward, I wore the dummy-sized dress as a kind of painter’s smock, the thick, scratchy gold brocade glistening like coins. I knew to be careful with it. It wasn’t like the five-dollar mini dresses and boy’s blazers my mother usually bought for the dolls. It was art. Art you could wear. Since then, I’ve had the honor of wearing a lot of artful designers and playacting at a lot of adult looks. But I’ve never worn an Isabel Toledo. After news of her passing, I did what any archivist and fan would do: I began to scour consignment sights for a piece to call my own. I saw red dresses that looked like origami, shades of auburn that looked 3-D, and coats with secret twists and hidden assets.
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