February 9, 2007
Fashion Diary
The Pragmatism and Poetry of Isabel Toledo
By
GUY TREBAY
Historically, the road to the Great American Designer has led to some weird forks, a lot of shimmering mirages and the occasional dead end. Perhaps, like the search for the Great American Novel (which, let’s face it, was written by
Herman Melville in 1851), the reality may be that the crowning achievements in the field are already behind us. Aren’t Claire McCardell, Norman Norell, Charles James and Mainbocher long dead?
The season ending here today should be remembered as a strong one for American designers who, while they may have failed to produce a great overarching vision, made it clear why innovation and technical assurance are traditional hallmarks of American industrial design. People like Thakoon Panichgul, Phillip Lim, the newcomer Chris Benz, the warhorse
Michael Kors, the occasionally uneven Behnaz Sarafpour and the, at this point, bulletproof
Marc Jacobs all gave plenty of evidence that American designers are on their game.
Still, there was no one to drape the banner on, no one to wear the crown. The reason may be simple enough: the Great American Designer has been hidden right here, in plain sight, all along. And if the industry drumbeat can be trusted, this is likely to change today when Isabel Toledo shows for the first time in her role as the newly named creative director of the classic American label Anne Klein.
Long an indie darling, Ms. Toledo’s formalist designs, like the best architecture, rarely omit the frisson of sex. Born in Cuba, she designs with a sensuality closer to the stern severity of that island’s European mother culture than the usual Caribbean Latin clichés. Ms. Toledo’s family came to the United States when she was a child, and while she says of herself that she is “not really American, not white,” there are few designers now working who seem more fundamentally homegrown.
“American fashion exists,” said Kim Hastreiter, an editor of Paper magazine. “It exists in an amazing way and its biggest hope during Fashion Week is Isabel at Anne Klein.”
Many in the business found it somewhat surprising when Peter Boneparth, the president and chief executive of the $5 billion conglomerate Jones Apparel, charged Ms. Toledo with the task of repositioning a label with annual sales totaling $550 million. Wasn’t Ms. Toledo a design eccentric, a downtown niche person, a kook too rarefied for the mainstream?
“A lot of people think of her as arty and avant-garde, and she is,” said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the
Fashion Institute of Technology. “She’s also one of our greatest American designers and in a way that goes back to the tradition of Claire McCardell.” Ms. Steele was referring to a designer who famously took the same can-do approach to dressmaking that industrial design greats like Charles and Ray Eames applied to turning steamed plywood into beautiful objects of mass production and timeless appeal.
Norman Norell once said of McCardell that, while virtually anyone could make a beautiful dress, it took a woman of special gifts to “take $5 worth of common calico and turn it into something a stylish woman would wear.” Ms. Toledo’s approach is not unlike McCardell’s or Anne Klein’s, she explained last week as she shuffled through racks of samples at the corporate studio, a vast space set high over Seventh Avenue. “From the beginning I have been stuck and pigeonholed into being ‘special’ because my designs were not loud and obvious,” she said.
“People told me to go to Europe,” said Ms. Toledo, who is in her 40s and has won numerous honors, among them the National Design Award presented in 2005. “But I didn’t want to go to Europe. I passed up opportunities there because I’m basically about American design.”
What does that mean, exactly? “Problem solving,” she said. “How do you achieve the beauty and integrity of the design without losing the soul?” One example of Ms. Toledo’s innovativeness, and eccentricity, is a dress she called the Hermaphrodite and showed in 1998, the last time she held a runway show.
A series of rings stitched around the dress creates the effect of pouchlike folds; it’s a beautiful object, perhaps better suited for museum shows (it will be included in a London show called “New York Fashion Now”) than settings where traditional Anne Klein customers are presumably found. Yet Ms. Toledo’s techniques translated easily when she designed an evening dress for the new collection; its pleats and rolls look like the mad stitching of blind nuns. In fact, they were produced by manipulating the pattern. “The pattern forces the cloth to do that,” Ms. Toledo said.
Plenty of designers can make a beautiful dress once, Ms. Toledo added, echoing Norell. And the industry is oversupplied with people who do. Many of these “talents” would be better characterized as performance artists than designers, since their main skill is producing eye-dazzling stunts, image engines, intended mostly to drive global sales of handbags and perfumes.
“There is so much hype surrounding the business now that you end up with celebrity designers, socialite designers, a whole litany of designers who aren’t trained in design,” the designer Maggie Norris explained. “What gets lost is the content, the quality and integrity of thought”; properties, she added, essential to good design.
Integrity has become a watchword in fashion lately. “We’re all looking for authenticity and integrity,” said Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director at Bloomingdale’s. “We’re all looking for a brave new idea. What we’re not looking for is another idea copied or resurrected from the past.”
Ms. Toledo’s obsession with pragmatism, and problem solving, drives everything she does. Yet there is no reason, she pointed out, that pragmatism has to come at the expense of poetry. A coat she designed for Anne Klein and terms the Origami has both: an engineering trick was required to produce a sculptural rounded collar that folds ingeniously on itself, an effect so subtle it is hard to imagine how difficult it was to achieve. And there lies Ms. Toledo’s art.
“That pink origami coat is totally Anne Klein and totally Isabel,” said Sally Singer, the fashion features editor of Vogue. “When I previewed the
collection and saw that coat, I was thrilled.”
Lee Clower for The New York Times
DRESS REHEARSAL Isabel Toledo, right, the new creative director of Anne Klein, adjusts the fit on a model.
Lee Clower for The New York Times
Isabel Toledo with a model, at the Anne Klein showroom.
Lee Clower for The New York Times
A look from her much anticipated show.
