Ralph Rucci, the CFDA’s 2025 Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award honoree, creates garments that deliver luxury that is less quiet than serene. His customers, women like Deeda Blair and Martha Stewart, have refined their environments and personal styles to perfection. They are inhabitants of worlds apart which accommodate the time it takes for craft.
The designer, a Philadelphian by birth, has described himself as an “American couturier.” In the late ’70s, after studying literature and philosophy at Temple University, Rucci moved to New York where he enrolled at FIT. Graduating with a fashion degree in 1980, he started working right away and established his own label, Ralph Rucci in 1984. Ten years later he created Chado Ralph Rucci. The designer is known for his artisanal savoir faire and his signature is a suspension technique that renders his garments light and sometimes almost porous.
Rucci was invited by the Federation de la Haute Couture et de la Mode to show his custom creations in Paris, which he did for the first time for fall 2002, and the Museum at FIT marked the designer’s 25th anniversary in 2007 with a show, “Ralph Rucci: The Art of Weightlessness.”
Though he left his brand in 2014, Rucci continues to design. In advance of the awards ceremony on November 3, we celebrate the Rucci-isms that have garnered him so much esteem.
Sheer
Suiting
Knotting
Suspension
Art
LBDs and LWDs
Statement Dressing
