The island of Ralph Rucci

The exacting, artistic fashion designer Ralph Rucci, and one of his couture gowns below, inspired by the artist Francis Bacon (photo by William Palmer, courtesy The Museum at FIT).

By Stephanie Murg

The fashion world has a knack for saving the best for last. At Fashion Week in New York, held in February, the final show in Bryant Park’s largest venue was reserved for Chado Ralph Rucci. Even on a frigid Friday night, when the media was maximally exhausted and the maintenance workers stood poised to pull up the tent stakes, the designs of Ralph Rucci had the power to elicit gasps of awe and bursts of applause from spectators who had been sure, only moments before, that they had seen it all.

The show, a combined exhibition of Rucci’s fall/winter 2007 ready-to-wear and spring 2007 haute couture, featured 65 exquisite ensembles on 34 models. Their sooty eyelids fluttered with double sets of false lashes below hair that was capped slickly in Saran Wrap. The inspiration? Artist Louise Nevelson, of course.

“This collection, I was totally possessed with Nevelson, and the way she conducted herself,” says designer Ralph Rucci, who in 2002 became the first American since Mainbocher in the 1930s to show his own collection during couture week in Paris. “And her walls — when she would comb garbage and then create those installations and then paint them black, silver, gold, or white.” And the lashes and cellophane? A way to make the girls “look like Nevelson conceptually and Nevelson realistically.”

Nevelson assembled discarded household objects and found items into Abstract Expressionist constructions, while Rucci is more likely to combine, for example, a paper-faced Russian honey sable coat and serape with a double-faced wool crepe tunic and pants embroidered in tiger eye. Despite the obvious differences between these two artists, the common effect of their work is both life-giving and spiritual. “When you put together things that other people have thrown out,” Nevelson once said. “You’re really bringing them to life — a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.” Rucci describes his most recent collection as being driven by “the thread of life motif, where the cloth finally leaves the surface of the fabric and indeed, becomes a three-dimensional surface.”

But this collection will not be remembered as “the time Rucci channeled Nevelson.” Unlike most designers, Rucci is not fueled by seasonal, one-off inspirations. With each collection, he subtly spotlights a subset of the cultural “touchstones” that have shaped, inspired, and pushed his work for the past 25 years. A retrospective of Rucci’s work, on view through April 14th at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), is a testament to the timelessness, cohesiveness, and sheer beauty that are among the greatest rewards of his approach.

At a recent presentation at FIT, entitled “Seeking My Vocabulary,” Rucci held the crowd in rapture as he charismatically guided them through slides of people, places, and things that influenced him, from an impeccably dressed Pauline de Rothschild to a Richard Serra monolith. “The images that I’m showing you today have to do with the continuum, the vocabulary that I keep in my brain that I constantly touch,” he told the crowd. “By the time I get to the very last slide, it’s as if I have to go through all of these images plus many more that I didn’t bring with me, so that I can arrive at a clarity and start fresh.”

With a click, the screen filled with a photograph of a man contemplating a blank white canvas. “This is part god, part extraterrestrial visionary,” said Rucci. “His name is Cy Twombly.” The American-born artist and his transcendent scribbles are among Rucci’s greatest influences. “When I first saw images by Twombly, I did not quite understand them,” says Rucci, who found the work “disturbing” until he came to realize what he was looking at, the distillation of years of thought and training. “That’s what fascinates me more than anything,” he says. “To distill in thought and in mind a physical act, so that three or five lines could become more empowering than a panorama.”

Two seasons ago, Rucci’s haute couture collection featured dresses based on the seasons themselves, inspired by Twombly’s Quattro Stagioni (“Four Seasons”) series of paintings from 1993-94. Each sculptural strapless dress acts as a canvas of white silk gazar, on which the French firm of Jean Luca Bernardi painstakingly embroidered Twombly-like drips, slashes of color, and scrawled references to classical antiquity.

The Four Seasons dresses, standing before a wall hung with Twombly drawings from Rucci’s collection, are among the works on view in “Ralph Rucci: The Art of Weightlessness,” the FIT retrospective organized by Patricia Mears, deputy director of The Museum at FIT, together with Dr. Valerie Steele, director and chief curator; and Fred Dennis, associate curator.

“The work of Ralph Rucci is like an exotic island in the vast sea of contemporary fashion — enchanting, but not well known,” writes Mears in the exhibition catalogue, published by Yale University Press. The museum’s lower level is given over to exploring and celebrating that island, including works of art collected by the designer (a Francis Bacon lithograph, a Tang Dynasty horseman in Rucci’s favorite shade of cinnabar, and the head and feet of a bronze Buddhist deity propped on a scaffolding of Lucite so that it resembles a doll ready to be dressed), the accessories that have adorned his runway looks (including a necklace by Dean Harris that makes a pendant of a porcupine quill), and paintings by Rucci.

The main exhibition space divides Rucci’s deceptively simple garments into such themes as “art influences,” “surface splendor,” and “tailoring.” The “fauna” section displays his deft hand with such rarified pelts as Barguzin sable, once reserved for the use of the czar and his family, and white burnt ostrich feathers. There is even a jogging suit, made from chocolate brown alligator pailettes. And if the weather looks questionable, the intrepid jogger can take along her silk gros de longres and alligator raincoat.

The central area of the main room features 13 of Rucci’s “Infanta” evening dresses, inspired by the likes of Velasquez and what Rucci calls the “delicate perversity of court portraits.” Five of the majestic dresses are suspended from the ceiling at various heights, allowing the viewer to examine the garments from every angle.

“Ralph’s contributions come from his ability as a technician, a craftsman,” says Steele. “He’s in the line of designers like [Madeleine] Vionnet and Madame Grés, who were trying to explore the craft of fashion. And I think that what he’s managed to do is more impressive in terms of what he’s contributed to the field of fashion than many, many dozens of theme collections by other designers.”

Rucci’s defiantly anti-trend approach is grounded in a reverence for the liberal arts as well as the fine arts. Born into a conservative Italian family in South Philadelphia, he studied philosophy and literature at Temple University before pursuing graduate studies at FIT. His decision to become a fashion designer was sparked in a library, where he saw David Bailey’s 1967 photographs of gowns created by Spanish-Basque couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga. “When I discovered the work of Balenciaga, it was as something was released,” says Rucci. “I knew that I wanted to get into fashion design. I knew that I was going to approach it as a rigor, and I used this man [Balenciaga] as a handle to get myself in the door.”

But once he got in the door, a long hallway loomed, as Steele explains in her illuminating catalogue essay. After graduating from FIT in 1980 and working briefly for Halston, Rucci designed his first collection from remnants of couture fabric. Only one dress sold. The ensuing years brought a series of freelance jobs, including a gig ghost-designing a line of Joan Collins hats, and continued efforts to sustain a collection business of his own.

In 1994, reluctant to relaunch under his name, he begin designing ready-to-wear under the label “Chado,” the name of a Japanese tea ceremony that contains 331 exacting steps. “It’s very ritualized, and I thought that it was a perfect word to represent what myself and my staff had achieved,” says Rucci. His work ultimately attracted the attention of Joan Kaner, then an executive at Neiman Marcus. Chado Ralph Rucci is now sold, for three - and four-figure sums, at that department store as well as Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Yet Rucci remained under the radar until, in a coup de couture, he was invited to show his handmade designs in Paris in 2002, the first American designer in more than 60 years to do so under his own label. The show took place on the afternoon of July 12, 2002. It was the last show of Paris couture week.

What’s next for Rucci? He would like to one day design menswear and a home collection. “But I will not attempt this until we have the production facilities to handle this with the same perfection as the ready-to-wear and the haute couture,” says Rucci. “Plus the financial ability.”

Finances are a perennial concern. “Every day of my life I am still dedicating 80 percent of the day to finances. I continuously struggle, because I don’t compromise,” says Rucci. “If you do something just to make money, you’re going to compromise your initial point of view.” At the same time, he cautions young fashion designers, “It’s very realistic to in some way know that the financial aspect of the business is so essential, because you don’t want to break your heart too many times.”

Last year, scholar and critic Benjamin Buchloh reviewed in Artforum the first major monographic study of the work of an American artist of some renown, one who had established his reputation in Europe, only to belatedly achieve recognition and acclaim in his home country. Buchloh noted how the artist “emerges, as we have long had reason to assume he would, as an immensely learned and very traditional artist, whose choice of a secondary European identity is perfectly plausible.” The artist Buchloh was describing was Cy Twombly, who left New York for Rome in 1957 and had to wait until 1994, the year of his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), for the beginnings of widespread critical recognition of his central place in American painting of the 1960s.

In the catalogue for that exhibition, the late Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly’s work in words that can also describe that of Ralph Rucci: “It will almost certainly continue to defy ready acceptance by a wide audience, as its particular impact depends so strongly on the kind of direct response to physical presence that is resistant to verbalization and uncongenial to analysis.” In other words, you have to see it for yourself.