Untitled (Two figures holding "rich," "poor" placards), 1998, 2004, 1998

Ruben Toledo is a Cuban fashion artist. He and wife Isabel Toledo work closely together in several fields of fashion. She is a fashion designer known for producing clothing that combines sophisticated simplicity and meticulous craftsmanship. He is a fashion artist whose distinctive drawings have appeared in many fashion publications and whose work extends to designing mannequins and painting murals for fashionable restaurants; Isabel is his muse and almost invariably his model. He also is responsible for managing the business side of her clothing business. Theirs is a true creative partnership; it is impossible to delineate the boundaries of the contribution of each to the work of the other.



Ruben Toledo was born in Cuba in 1960; he and Isabel met in school as members of the large Cuban expatriate community of northern New Jersey. They quickly recognized one another as kindred spirits and began collaborating in art and design. They were married in 1984.



The Toledos had a major exhibition, Toledo/Toledo: A Marriage of Art and Fashion, at the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in 1999. Ruben’s illustrations reached a wide audience in his witty book, Style Dictionary (1997). In one of his iconoclastic fashion illustrations, entitled “Fashion history goes on strike,” Ruben portrayed dresses from the past, from New Look to Mod, parading across the page in a militant demonstration, carrying placards reading, “Let us rest in peace! No more retro! Look forward, not backward!” Both of the Toledos remain on the cutting edge of style, moving fashion forward.

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