Sterling Ruby has been a fashion-adjacent artist for a while now, most famously through his collaborations with Raf Simons, at the Belgian designer’s own name brand, as well as during his tenures at Dior and Calvin Klein.
The Raf Simons x Sterling Ruby collaboration for autumn/winter 14 probably marked the high water mark of the artist x fashion cross-over, for its sense of depth, and its holistic approach, which stretched deeper than image printed on T-shirt or jumper. The collection felt more like one of Sterling’s paintings had morphed itself into a garment.
A reason could be because Sterling, himself, has been making clothing since 2008, when he began to create garments out of leftover scraps of canvas and fabric from the paintings and sculptures he’d been working on. These garments quickly became a kind of studio uniform for the artist — paint splattered denims with bleached canvases and ribbed, elasticated hems (he exhibited these creations at Sprüth Magers in London in 2016).
Now Sterling Ruby is launching his own line of clothing, set to debut during Pitti Uomo on 13 June. The label will be called S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA. and will involve ready-to-wear clothing and accessories, developed from these studio experimentations with garments. “I’ve always been interested in the behavioural power that comes with clothing,” Sterling said in a statement yesterday. “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.”