Sunday Best: 'Design is so different than fashion'

She described her own work as "romantic mathematics." Isabel Toledo, the Cuban American fashion designer who leapt to national fame after designing Michelle Obama's iconic 2009 inaugural parade outfit, died last week in Manhattan of breast cancer. She was 59. Hers was a life lived in fashion: attending the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design in New York; becoming Diana Vreeland's intern at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of New York; introducing her first fashion line in 1984; and running her own company from a loft building in midtown Manhattan. Obama's coat and matching dress, rendered in an unusual shade of yellow-green and seeming to convey both whimsical elegance and sunshiny optimism on a cold January day, became an instantly memorable look. Toledo once said, "Design is so different than fashion. That's why design lasts forever."