Toledo and Toledo
By Miguel Paolo Celestial
Published in Rogue Magazine, November 2008
There are the usual and now common collaborations between visual artists, fashion designers, architects, and interior and industrial designers, lasting only one or several seasons. Usually the convergence is pure business: to expand the visual language of a brand or to search for new synergies between disciplines to push their limits. The conversation that takes place is often times terse, limited, and in terms of relationships, fixed.
Then there are the rare marriages of heart, mind, and creative sensibility. These blessed occurrences happen less between corporations than between talented individuals, and in the case of artist Ruben Toledo and fashion designer Isabel Toledo, between actual spouses.
Their creative fusion has spanned two decades and covers fashion design, painting, illustration, and even sculpture.
Ruben has designed perfume bottles, mannequins, award statuettes, store windows, scarves, fabrics, dishes, and carpets. He has painted portraits, murals, and album covers...
(Ruben Toledo) is married to fashion not only because he illustrates for brands and magazines, but also because his dreams inspire the clothes of his designer wife, Isabel, who in turn inspires him as his muse. The Toledos are each other’s creative sustenance and are together an artistic force...
Incidentally, Isabel also designs her husband's clothes, lending the minute idiosyncracies she is known for.
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