About
Cafe Mortel is a creative studio exploring a new death culture founded in 2024 by Ruby Cohen Love. It conceptualises and produces content, installations, experiences, and curates remembrance objects through the lens of art and contemporary culture.
In 2017, Cohen Love envisioned her own funeral as a fashion exhibition in Copenhagen. A moment that reframed death as an act of creation. That personal vision became Cafe Mortel. The name draws from Bernard Crettaz and the death cafe movement, which opened intimate spaces for conversations about mortality. Cafe Mortel continues that dialogue through a different lens: art, contemporary culture, and the objects and experiences that surround loss.
Cohen Love is an artist and creative director. Central Saint Martins graduate. She moves between fashion, art, and the study of death and dying, proposing that how we mark loss deserves the same imagination and intention as any other moment in life.
Press
"Ruby Cohen Love, the founder of the funeral design studio Cafe Mortel, embraced a slightly different energy when it came to her own big birthday. 'I chose to stage my funeral rehearsal for my 30th. It is a retrospective of my life so far, without judgment. Even if I'm not dead, my twenties are — this felt like the right moment and format to honour what I've lived.'"
"A memorial design studio that orchestrates ceremonies and artworks or installations to commemorate her clients' lives. Cohen Love threw herself a memorial rehearsal — an 'amazing' event that served 'as a powerful exercise to examine your life'. She created an immersive exhibition using objects, garments, films and smells to tell her life story."
— The Telegraph
"What Ruby is doing is genius and groundbreaking. She has the opportunity to change Western ideas about death."
— Sarah Bailey, The Telegraph / Vogue Greece
"Mind-blowing, eye-opening, thought-provoking, inspirational. I'm definitely booking Cafe Mortel to sort out my funeral. It's the modern way to think about life and death."
— Brix Smith, Guitarist, The Fall
"What Cafe Mortel is doing is very important. The more I have thought of this, the more I understand how much we all need it."
— Azzi Glasser, Perfumer