It Takes Two.(Ruben and Isabel Toledo)(Interview)

There are some clothes, like cars, that pique your curiosity, and you just have to know (or, if you are a child of the quiz-show era, to show off by guessing) their make and model. About ten years ago, I startled a grande dame by asking her if the cocktail dress she was wearing, hands down the chicest in the room, wasn't a Dior, from 1948. It looked perfectly contemporary, but Dior did some of his greatest work in the same fabric: a glossy, malleable black satin that held its shape like meringue. "Yes," she admitted, "but please don't tell anyone that I've been wearing it for half a century."

Not long afterward, at a party downtown, I saw another black dress, which was equally worthy of reverence, but this one I couldn't place, even after I had examined it from every angle. It belonged to a youthful woman who carried herself without the sense of preciousness that often marks a couture client like the grande dame. The material was unpretentious--cotton or rayon matte jersey--so not couture, I thought, yet like couture the cut had a mandarin inscrutability. Softly pleated, overlapping swags fell from the shoulders and were molded to the body like the leaves of a corn husk, tapering to a narrow V that should have hobbled the woman's ankles, but she moved gracefully. I was just about to tap her on the shoulder when she turned and, reading my intentions with a look of amusement, uttered two words: "Isabel Toledo."

My first encounter with Toledo's work was an upscale parody of a commercial that fashion lovers of a certain age will remember. The commercial--for the Anne Klein budget line, Anne Klein II--ran in the nineteen-eighties and made a deeper impression than the sportswear it advertised. There were several spots, all a version of the same scenario. In one, a handsome cowboy notices a cool, urbanlooking woman in a fast car who has stopped to make a phone call at a gas station. As she strides toward the booth with a jacket tossed over her shoulders, then juggles her Filofax with the receiver, she catches the cowboy sizing her up but pays no attention. He seems mystified, as much by his own attraction as by her independence. (That wishful notion--that independence is attractive to he-men--lives on as a plot staple of cable television.) Just as he is mustering the courage to address her, she utters three words: "Anne Klein II."

In 2006, Isabel Toledo, of all people, was hired as the creative director of Anne Klein. She has always been her own woman, so the choice seemed apt demographically, if for no other reason. But Anne Klein makes clothing for the office and for suburban weekends, and is sold largely in malls, whereas Toledo, a forty-seven-year-old, Cuban-born avant-gardist, is virtually unknown outside the fashion world, and initiates speak of her talent with the kind of awe generally reserved for a chess prodigy. She is often mentioned with Geoffrey Beene and Charles James as a designer's designer, someone whose cutting has an ingenious rigor not obvious to a layman. "I think one can fairly call Isabel a genius," Valerie Steele told me recently. (Steele, the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, is planning to give Toledo a "mid-career" retrospective in 2009.) "She has an ability to do the kind of spatial modelling in her head that a computer does. By pulling a drawstring through the fabric, or folding it like origami, though also using more conventional techniques--seaming and draping--in innovative ways, she transforms a geometric plane into a poetic volume that you couldn't have imagined." (Toledo has described her craft as "romantic mathematics.")

Toledo's surprise appointment to her position at Anne Klein, and her abrupt dismissal from it, one year and three well-received collections later, got more press than her own line has ever generated. She has worked outside the mainstream, without much fanfare or capital (yet always with the interest of an elite--she won a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in 2005), for the past quarter of a century, and her longevity in a fickle business that eats its young and abandons its old on the ice floes of oblivion is a rare feat. "Maybe I've survived because I'm not a fashion person," she told me. "I don't like the disposable culture fashion feeds into--I see myself as a maker of great hand-me-downs. Objects or clothes last because they function, and because you've found the most rational solution to a design problem." (Despite her beauty--huge eyes in a pale, angular face with a regal forehead--Toledo doesn't look much like a fashion person, either, or, at least, not in her working uniform: a pair of clogs, white carpenter pants, and a sweater, with her old-fashioned hair cascading down her back like the tresses of a Gothic Magdalene from Galicia, where her mother's family originated.)

Since 1984, when she opened her house, working out of a tenement next to the Port Authority and doing all the sewing herself, Toledo has been married to her business partner, Ruben Toledo, an artist, set designer, filmmaker, and one of the fashion world's leading illustrators. (In the introduction to "Style Dictionary," Ruben's affectionately scathing cartoon glossary of fashion's absurdities, Richard Martin, the late curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, compared his work to the caricatures of Daumier and Grandville.)

The Toledos are an inseparable couple--a collective of two. He is the impetuous, outgoing one, a wiry man with a trim mustache who cuts the figure of a bohemian dandy and does most of the talking. They have a long lease on four floors of a loft building in the flower district, which houses her workrooms, and they live upstairs, in a garret penthouse they renovated on the cheap, fifteen years ago. A dining room, furnished with a marble drafting table at which they eat and work, opens onto a listing balcony that overlooks a former lithography studio. They sleep on a mezzanine, under a ceiling splotched by a century of water stains--yellow scabs that sometimes reopen. Ruben covered two of the walls with a graffiti-like frieze of faces. The decor is, as he puts it, "a crazy quilt" of found objects--puppets, a birdcage, hula hoops--some hanging from the rafters. A cactus from Woolworth's is now, thanks to Isabel's "insane green thumb," fifteen feet tall. Friends contributed eccentric furniture, and, surrounded by art books, canvases, and stylized dress forms that Ruben designs for Pucci Mannequins (including the refreshingly well-padded "Birdie"--38-32-44), a woodwormridden Buddha sits on an odd-shaped table. A week before Christmas, the drafts rattling the safety glass of a big skylight in the main room, which frames a view of the Empire State Building, were so icy that I asked Isabel to lend me a sweater-- the Toledos sometimes have to wear the matching ski suits that hang on pegs in the bathroom. She does the cooking in a tiny alcove, and he brews the Cuban coffee. They have Sunday brunch together, lingering over it for hours, and at night, if they don't feel like going out, Ruben said, "we put some cha-cha or rumba music on and boogie around by ourselves. We're both great dancers."