Rosina rucci biography definition

As summer is coming to an end, and the season is changing into fall (Yay, my favorite fashion season!), I’d like to pay homage to a designer who helped spark the fashion gene inside of me and nurtured it grow into something much bigger. You see, whenever I first started studying fashion in NYC, the first designer collection that I ever witnessed at the world renowned Metropolitan Museum was Ralph Rucci.

His collections are filed under the name Chado Ralph Rucci, but he wasn’t a designer that I knew the way I did Coco Chanel and Michael Kors. Through Fashion History Classes, I learned that he is recognized as one of (possibly the only) American couturier by the CFDA. (Council of Fashion Designers of America) This is a HUGE accomplishment and something that many American designers strive for and never reach.

If you are curious about the true definition of a couturier, it  literally comes from a french word mean “to sew.” For something to be considered to be couture, the clothing must meet the following stipulations:

• it must be produced in small quantities
• it must only utilize hand-sewing techniques (no sewing machines allowed here)
• it must be sized specifically to fit a specific individual’s body (1)

Yes, I pulled out one of my old fashion textbooks so that I got these worded  just right! With labels such as Juicy Couture and Romeo and Juliet Couture on the market, I know this can be a little bit confusing, but this is how true couture is determined and recognized by the CFDA.

Anyways, the collection that was shown was outstanding, breathtaking, and was an accurate depiction of his true mastery of his craft. This Pennsylvania native originally started doing women’s Ready to Wear collections more than twenty-five years ago and didn’t start his couture collection until 2002. His first collection was shown in Paris and was, of course, a hug

As his fashion house approaches 30, a new book and upcoming film take a peak into the life of the enigmatic designer

• By Christopher Petkanas / NY Times News Service, NEW YORK

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.

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.”

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