Sterling Ruby
This January, Ruby showed his latest collection as part of the Paris haute couture season – although it was actually a film recorded in the small industrial city of Vernon, California, where his studio is based. After that presentation – and in the midst of preparations for Van Noten’s Autumn/Winter 2021 collection – the two creative minds came together to bridge not only some 5,400 geographic miles, but the possibly even greater divide that remains between art and fashion.
“The most influential creatives I’ve admired – a writer, a film director, a designer or an artist – have always responded to their time in history” – Sterling Ruby I also like to try to find whatever comes across in either field that strikes a chord, something that blurs those boundaries, that doesn’t necessarily allow itself to be categorised. But I also hear what you are saying, about the art world looking down on fashion as if it’s this commercial enterprise, which, sure, it is, but so is a lot of art as well., the Fran Lebowitz documentary, and she and Scorsese are talking about the fine arts.
I come from a deep community of craft, where craft was very divided in the way you are talking about it. It was a discipline – you knew how to make something from wood, or metal, or textile – but also a kind of emblem. The idea that an object was made to be given out of love, that it was worth more because of that. I do believe that the handmade is becoming a little bit more of a symbol of our times, strangely enough. And maybe that’s just because, particularly right now, we don’t have touch.
How can you do that? You can’t see clients any more so you have to reinvent, but with a lot of limitations. And in fact, it’s quite stimulating because you start to see some of the things we’ve lost. I’m trying to make these nuanced, almost abstract, nods to living through reality. I think my art has always been political, in one way or another. So it’s hard for me to consider that, even in the lead-up to the current situation, the work I was making didn’t engage with what was going on in the world – either in a global sense, or more regionally in America.