“I don’t pull [a Chado Ralph Rucci collection] together until very late, because I keep on adding—and editing. It doesn’t all come together until the fittings are finished, and then I line up for the show, because I don’t work with a stylist. I don’t understand how I possibly could, for two reasons. Part of my work, after I design the clothes for consumption—for the buyers to pull apart and buy for their locations—is also to make a presentation that tells a story for the press and for the history of our profession. And so how could a stylist know what’s in my psyche? And after having this huge period of solitude of just working with my friends [to design, construct, and edit the collection], how could I sit down with a stylist and talk about all of that? Perhaps a psychiatrist that I’ve worked with, but not a stylist to put together clothes! The other part of that is that I find that the formula that has occurred in our industry in the past however many years while I’ve been in this business, where a stylist prepares it for the press so that all the messages read somewhat the same, I can’t do that. I would choke.”

-Fashion designer Ralph Rucci, in an interview with modaCYCLE (video below). Rucci will receive the André Leon Talley Lifetime Achievement Award this evening at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s annual fashion show. An exhibit of his work opens today at the SCAD Museum of Art.