You might expect a book on the designer Ralph Rucci to have a scholarly appreciation by the fashion historian Valerie Steele; swooning testimonials from society clients of Rucci’s like Deeda Blair and Susan Gutfreund; and romantic color plates of his high-wire dresses by a princeling photographer on the order of, say, Patrick Demarchelier.
But Autobiography of a Fashion Designer: Ralph Rucci, a US$195 slipcased and cotton-clothbound doorstop from the upstart art-book publisher Bauer and Dean, nominally by Rucci, is a pie in the face of conventional designer monographs. There are no baby pictures, no timeline, no biography (Rucci, 54, is the son of a Philadelphia butcher, but you won’t learn that here). There are nine pictures of his dog, at least five pictures of his dog’s toys, but no page numbers.
The press run of 3,000 coincides with the 30th anniversary of Rucci’s company, Chado Ralph Rucci, as well as the news that after four years of production, the documentary A Quiet American: Ralph Rucci & Paris is to be screened at New York Fashion Week next month.
Photo: EPA
The film’s director, Christian Leigh, is a former curator whose unpaid bills at the 1993 Venice Biennale led to works by Louise Bourgeois, Roy Lichtenstein and others being held in storage by creditors for about five years. Leigh disappeared during this time.
An exhibition, Notorious (Christian Leigh), an exploration of his career, is currently at the Castillo/Corrales gallery in Paris. “Leigh has made a habit of burning bridges, vanishing overnight and of reinventing himself anew in a different milieu,” the gallery says on its Web site, adding that Leigh’s biographies include trails of “angry creditors, ripped-off artists, bamboozled collaborators.”
It remains to be seen whether the Rucci project will redeem Leigh’s reputation. Reached at home in London, Leigh denied cheating any artists. “I felt I did everything I could,” he said, then, “Well, maybe not.”
“I don’t really accept that I disappeared. Most people could reach me if they really wanted to.”
He proclaimed himself a great fan of Rucci. “I didn’t know him, but greatly admired his work,” Leigh said. “He’s one of the great artists working today. If he wants to work on one dress for 16 weeks, he won’t compromise.”
He suggested his documentary had equal integrity. “It’s not gossipy or bitchy,” Leigh said. “It’s not ‘How hissy fits make fashion,’ like the Valentino movie.”
Until A Quiet American is unveiled, there is Autobiography of a Fashion Designer, which — depending on how one looks at it — is either the ultimate tome for fashion insiders or maddeningly presumptive, with names dropped and left floating without explanation.
Rucci, the only American designer besides Mainbocher ever to show in Paris with the blessing of the French haute couture sanctioning body, and one of the few not to have succumbed to mass production, said: “I don’t have much perspective on myself. The book and movie are like psychological blackboards.”
As he tweaked sketches for his new furniture collection for Holly Hunt in his SoHo office recently, Rucci was surrounded by talismans: a liquid Joe Eula drawing of his old boss Halston in a fitting with Jacqueline Onassis, another by Kenneth Paul Block of Diana Vreeland in a seal coat with a stand-away Balenciaga collar.
Rucci said he gave Baldomero Fernandez, the book’s photographer, carte blanche, “drawing the line only at a basket of my underwear.” Gutfreund, he added: “shamed me into redoing my apartment. She was over one day and asked, ‘How can you expect a woman to sit on that?’ She was gesturing to a Mies chaise.”
Indeed, more than a third of the volume is taken up by photographs of Rucci’s aerie in a prewar building on New York’s East 72nd Street, sumptuously decorated by Gutfreund with silk organdy lampshades, leather walls embossed at breath-catching expense in a traditional Chinese thatched motif and a hand carved cocobolo-wood dry bar whipped up by Renzo Mongiardino, the maestro of Italian interior design, in the shape of the Duomo in Milan. A wraparound terrace is planted with a forest of weeping white birches.
There are also many photographs of commonplace details: a bucket of cleaning supplies, his television remote on a silver tray, a bunch of overripe bananas. Inside Rucci’s refrigerator are Fage yogurt, Red Jacket Orchards applesauce, Muscle Milk and a partly zested lemon.
“The model is Autobiography: Sol LeWitt 1980, with its purposely bad shots of everything from toilets to toolboxes,” said Beth Daugherty, the publisher of Bauer and Dean. “Ralph’s book wasn’t styled. The pictures are intentionally raw.”
Daugherty said she was vexed that the book, her first major title, has come out just as Leigh’s film, which she said she was unaware of until a few weeks ago, is being chatted about. Judging from a 31-minute rough cut of what the director said was an 89-minute movie, it is straightforward, if rather fawning.
In it, Tatiana Sorokko, who once modeled for Rucci and is now a client, is seen defending the stupendously high cost of his dresses, confected of duchess satin encased in chinoiserie threadwork, crepe braided to resemble the human spine and chiffon hand sewn with tiny bits of leather to evoke the crackled glaze of Chinese export porcelain. His ready-to-wear starts at US$5,000; couture, US$7,000.
It’s “not about the price,” Sorokko insists in the film. “You’re paying for his knowledge of fashion history and his intelligence.”
In the words of a patternmaker: “He knows what each cloth asks to be.”
The weaving together of the film is taking too long for Rosina Rucci, Rucci’s sister and communications director, who said the Rucci company had invested US$40,000 in the project and has expressed irritation with its slow progress.
“Is there a complete film?” she said. “After four years, we still don’t know.”
But Rucci, at least, is willing to wait.
“When I met him I was totally mesmerized by his fanaticism,” he said, regarding Leigh. “Listen, I know this man’s heart, and I also see the demons. If there’s a disconnect, it’s not for me to judge. I choose to support him. Christian’s logic I’ve learned not to touch. Like Mrs Vreeland, it’s all hieroglyphics.”
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS