Artist Sterling Ruby Is Launching a Fashion Collection

California-based artist Sterling Ruby has announced this morning that he will be launching a ready-to-wear collection, set to debut in June this year. Entitled S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA., and encompassing both mens- and womenswear, the collection will be an evolution of his artwork, which often includes fabric elements, from quilts and bleach-sprayed fabrics to soft sculpture. “I’ve always been interested in the behavioural power that comes with clothing,” he said in a statement. “For years I have been privately exploring garments as a medium, as something that impacts the way one can think, feel, and move. I couldn’t be more excited to finally put my clothing out into the world.”

Ruby, though, is no stranger to fashion – a fruitful collaboration with Raf Simons has seen him work alongside the Belgian designer at both his eponymous label and subsequently at Calvin Klein, where Ruby created numerous installations for runway shows and the brand’s head office during the designer’s time there as creative director. Simons’ own-label Autumn/Winter 2014 collection was perhaps their most prolific collaboration, where a co-designed collection (both Ruby’s and Simons’ names appeared on the garments’ labels) encompassed several elements reminiscent of the artist’s BC/Bleach Collage series, including bleach-spattered fabrics, galactic prints and acid-coloured patches.

The announcement follows Ruby’s most recent show DAMNATION at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, a powerful exploration of mass incarceration in America through aerial films of vast prison complexes, collages and sculpture. “I first wanted to get to the core of a kind of repression, and I felt that incarceration was somehow applicable to so many things – the psychological, the societal, the racial,” he told critic and curator Mimi Zeiger in the Spring/Summer 2019 issue of AnOther Magazine. “All of these things are at the centre of American history.”

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