Fashion wears many faces; it has the urge to belong to a group - to charm - but also the urge to be exclusive and snobbish to carve out individuality. That is the genius of fashion! Fashion is what time looks like, and it's up to us all to shape what our own time looks like. Fashion is a collaborative art form in this way... We all paint the picture.

To see the clothes in movement like that, to create for dancers, is special.

Fashion lives in the world of ideals; it is not necessarily grounded in the real world. The question becomes whose ideal it is. My ideal happens to be diversity. I love difference. I love change. I love experimentation and eccentricities. I like not knowing something and then discovering. Fashion can only reflect this diversity if we designers have an open and curious mind.

Isabel Toledo

Isabel Toledo

I love theater, a performance and designing a visual spectacle. It is like creating a composition with clothes, which have to fit the psychology as well as the body of characters. The performance is frozen in time, the clothes have to stay reliable and help to define the story. Fashion can be much more abstract. It needs no story because the woman is the story. She supplies the text and content. Fashion for retail is the opposite of frozen, it has to change and morph constantly to stay relevant - to be the "fashion.".

Isabel Toledo

I don't think of myself as a brand, simply a designer. A fashion designer who is married to an artist and together we have woven a body of worth through the years - with hopefully a recognizable signature. I look forward to one day becoming a brand... But that takes a business structure with brilliant business people to run it. I do look forward to that chapter in our life.

Isabel Toledo

Fashion is every woman's language, and every woman's tool. Fashion is anatomy for me, creating your second skin is one of the most intimate art forms I can think of.

Isabel Toledo

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