Isabel Toledo (1960 – 2019) was born in Cuba. She moved to New Jersey at a young age, where she attended high school and met her future husband, Ruben Toledo. Isabel attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design.

Isabel designed her eponymous fashion collection, which was handmade in her legendary atelier for 35 years and staged runway shows in both New York and Paris. From 2006-2008, she was Design Director for the Anne Klein designer collection for Jones New York. She has also collaborated with many mass-market companies such as Payless, Target and Lane Bryant.

Isabel was the recipient of the Cooper-Hewitt Design Award for her work in fashion in 2005. She was also the recipient of an Otis Critics' Award by the Otis College of Art and Design. In 2008, Isabel was presented with the third annual Couture Council Award for Artistry of Fashion from the Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology. Isabel’s costumes for After Midnight, a Broadway musical about the legendary Cotton Club, resulted in a Tony Nomination.

Ruben Toledo was born in Havana, Cuba in 1961. He designs mannequins, store windows, award statuettes, scarves, fabrics, dishes, carpets and an animated film on the history of French fashion entitled Fashionation for the Syndicate De Couture in Paris. He has also created witty and incisive illustrations for top fashion magazines and journals, among them The New Yorker, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, Paper, Visionaire, Interview and The New York Times.

He created and illustrated Nordstrom’s national designer ad campaign and his drawings of 100 cities around the world can be found in Louis Vuitton’s City Guides. Toledo’s work has been on exhibit internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Victoria and Albert Museum in the U.K. He is the author of Style Dictionary, a collection of his drawings and watercolors, as well as the ‘Fashion Almanac’.

His collaboration with Isabel was the subject of a book and museum exhibition titled Toledo/Toledo: A Marriage of Art and Fashion at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. They launched their first fragrance collection, Hot House Beauties, with the fragrances Crystal Honey and Kuba Rose, an homage to their birthplace of Cuba. They are the subject of an upcoming auto-documentary.

Photo © Randall Bachner.