Isabel Toledo died Monday in a hospital in New York's Manhattan neighborhood. This was announced by her office via e-mail. Toledo had breast cancer. She was 59 years old.
The Cuban-born artist became known to a broader public with an outfit she had designed for the former First Lady of the USA, Michelle Obama. The combination of a yellow-green dress and a matching coat, Obama wore in 2009 for the inauguration of her husband Barack Obama.
Doug Mills / Pool / REUTERS
Washington 2009: The newly sworn President Barack Obama with his First Lady Michelle Obama in her outfit by Isabel Toledo
Thematic collections or lofty descriptions of their work were never Toledo's thing. She saw herself more as a craftswoman, the fabric was her inspiration enough. "I love sewing more than anything else," she once said in an interview. And further: "This is the real art, not fashion design, but the production." Toledo once told television channel CNN that she had started sewing at the age of eight. "I could not find anything else that I love."
Born in 1961 in Camajuaní, Cuba, Toledo emigrated to the United States with her parents and two sisters in her teens. The family moved to West New York in New Jersey. There she also met her future husband Ruben Toledo.
In New York, Toledo visited two design colleges - the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Parsons School of Design - but never graduated. She left in 1979 to do an internship with Diana Vreeland in the costume department of the New York Metropolitan Museum.
In 1985 she presented her first own collection. According to "Vogue", the New York luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman and the Italian designer Elio Fiorucci were among their first supporters. At the end of the 1990s, she caused a sensation when she showed her fashion in museums. From 2006 to 2007 she was briefly the designer of the label Anne Klein.
She often worked with her husband, the painter Ruben Toledo. Both were awarded the 2005 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. Her last collaborative project was an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, which explored the relationship between art and fashion.
