Sterling Ruby on the Books That Inspired His Latest Collection of Wearable Artworks
One of One reads the label sewn into the designs belonging to the ‘Unique’ tier of Sterling Ruby’s S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA. line. Along with the issue number, each look carries the artist’s signature, the date it was made, and an inventory code, which is stored in the same database as his artworks. We’re talking art that has been exhibited everywhere, from the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, and, more recently, Dover Street Market Los Angeles; creations that hang on the wall of his longtime collaborator Raf Simons’s home and that have inspired a shoe collection for Robyn Rihanna Fenty’s eponymous fashion house.
Now a brand in his own right having launched S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA. at Pitti Immagine Uomo in June 2019, Ruby’s wearable canvases are a home for the textile offcuts from his museum pieces and, in his words, “an effort to preserve a type of intimacy found in my art.” In doing so, he has not only famously found a fan in the likes of Timothée Chalamet who wore a pair of paint-splattered denim overalls on the promotional tour for The King last October, but is dismantling the pervasive hierarchies between different disciplines such as fine art and fashion.
“There’s an immediacy to these pieces,” Ruby tells Vogue. “They provide a way for me to sidestep the logistics and baggage of more traditional clothing production, bringing about a sense of autobiographical return.” Although he started sewing at the age of 13, he insists he is not a dressmaker—“On the contrary, my craftsmanship has always been rough and rudimentary”—and continues to work freestyle without a pattern. For Ruby, clothes making is intermeshed with the nostalgia of his youth—a time when he was blissfully oblivious to statements of sexuality and politics expressed through personal style and the craft of sewing itself.
Ruby’s latest series of works in garment form are “exercises in appropriation, hybrids of politicized language and highly designed fonts” made in response to the current political climate. They feature the covers of some of his favorite books including Hannah Arendt’s On Violence, Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House and James Baldwin’s Dark Days, to name a few. Using a heat press, Ruby juxtaposed these covers with images of caves, candles, and werewolves, printed on to the thrash-metal band Death Angel T-shirts that he’s worn for years.
At a time when our reading lists are in need of constant rejuvenation, it seemed fitting to ask Ruby to share his thoughts on the literature that never ceases to inspire him.
1. On Violence by Hannah Arendt
“‘Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent,’ Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1970 book On Violence. Arendt’s political theories and philosophies covered many different subject areas, but her writings on the Nazi party from a Jewish perspective resonate with particular relevance today. In Berlin during the early 1930s, she illegally researched and critiqued the rise of antisemitism, resulting in her arrest and imprisonment by the Gestapo. She fled from Germany to France and then New York, teaching at numerous universities while writing seminal philosophical texts on totalitarianism.
“Arendt coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ during her coverage of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961 [a high-ranking Nazi sentenced to death for war crimes] to describe the phenomenon that evil is often propagated through complacency and normalcy, not just sociopaths. It’s interesting to think of how individuals, groups, companies, and countries wield power. In the US, we are certainly living in a time where the president has no identification with soft power. Instead he is pushing spontaneous, chaotic, and violent rule, which has, for better or worse, illustrated how divided our country is.”
2. Men in Dark Times by Hannah Arendt
“Men in Dark Times (1968) was written as a collection of pieces, suggesting that even during the worst times, people can create works and lead lives that are illuminating. The text is rooted in Arendt’s own biography, almost more like a comparison of her life with those of other [political artists] such as Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Rosa Luxemburg. It seems important to remember that no matter how bad things are at any given moment —politically or emotionally— creative individuals will find ways to make something that gives us light and direction towards a new outcome.”
