“The immensity of the universe and microscopy of the cell, computers, and geometry. These are the sources of my inspiration. The garments I prefer are those I create for tomorrow’s world,” the Italian-French designer Pierre Cardin told author Marylou Luther.

“I invented the modern woman. I invented her past. I offered her a future,” said the French designer Yves Saint Laurent. “I wish I had invented blue jeans. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity—all I hope for in my clothes.”

“What is beautiful or meaningful is not always determined by the masses or conventional thought. Sometimes we are moved by beauty in things that break the traditional sense of values,” said the Japanese designer and Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo. “I always try to break the rules with everything because no really new strong creation ever didn’t.”

“I think there’s something really refreshing when things don’t change too much,” said the American designer Thom Browne.

“You can never take anything for granted in fashion,” said the British designer Alexander McQueen. “The only way to keep going in the right direction is to be constantly apprehensive. Fear is my best friend.”

“I was in Chicago for a personal appearance at Marshall Field’s,” the American designer Norman Norrell told the author. “At the dinner party following my show, a man at my table came up to me. He wanted to know if I would ask the woman seated next to him to marry him. If I would tell her to say yes, he persisted, he knew she would say yes. I did. She did. And they got married a few weeks later. I know you know this story, Marylou, because you were that woman.”

“Yes, I really do talk to my sewing machines,” said Isabel Toledo, the Cuban designer and wife of the illustrator Ruben Toledo.

“I don’t want to build air filters into clothes or try to solve pollution through design. I want to solve pollution itself,” said the Italian designer Gianni Versace. “I think the cities of the twenty-first century will be less crowded. People will work at home by computer, TV telephones. They won’t have to drive to work, so the air will have less toxic emissions.”

Forever in Fashion

A new volume pairs quotations by history’s best fashion designers, as told to the journalist Marylou Luther, with illustrations by Ruben Toledo

“We must use color to solve problems,” Thierry Mugler states in Be-Spoke, a compendium of quotations uttered to Marylou Luther by 72 designers, from Coco Chanel to Virgil Abloh, during her 70 years as a fashion journalist.

When it came time to illustrate the book, artist Ruben Toledo seems to have followed Mugler’s dictate. The Mugler entry, for example, is accompanied by variegated silhouettes of Mugler-clad ladies, spinning in kaleidoscopic patterns. To visualize Gianni Versace’s remarks about his hopes for a pollution-free future, Toledo lets loose a flock of rainbow-plumed birds, flying in Escher-like formation alongside two airborne divas, bedecked as brightly as their avian escorts.

Though, as Toledo notes, in his hands “even black ink on paper becomes colorful,” he is as adept at conjuring up a dark atmosphere as he is at deploying a prismatic palette. Opposite Alexander McQueen’s remark that “fear is my best friend,” Toledo depicts a coven of zombie-eyed damsels in cobweb dresses parading beneath, or hoisted aloft by, a cauldron of bats. The book’s most exquisite picture portrays Toledo’s late wife of 35 years, Isabel, talking to her sewing machines. “Painting and drawing keep my dream life with her going,” he says.

Leaving almost no page unembellished, Toledo has adorned the endpapers of Be-Spoke with stylistically varied portraits of all the designers, their faces lined up like photos in a “marvelous fashion-high-school yearbook,” Toledo says. His likeness of Michael Kors channels Van Gogh and Hockney; his depiction of Diane von Furstenberg suggests a Renaissance princess; his rendering of Emilio Pucci resembles a Gothic-stained-glass prophet; while his monochromatic image of Bill Blass recalls the incisive character studies of German Expressionism.

All Toledo’s work in Be-Spoke will be sold “to raise funds for several good causes, including a scholarship set up at F.I.T. by our amazing friends at Fashion Group International in Isabel’s name to help students pay tuition,” he says. Toledo hopes that the “magic alchemy of fashion”—so keenly illuminated by him in Be-Spoke—will boost the mood of every reader. “Fashion first exists in the mind,” he observes. “Then nature obliges.” —Amy Fine Collins

Amy Fine Collins is an Editor at Large for AIR MAIL.She is the author of The International Best-Dressed List: The Official Story