About
Ruby Cohen Love is an artist, creative director and founder whose practice spans death culture, media, experiences and remembrance objects.of death culture, media, experiences and remembrance objects. She studied Fashion Communication and Promotion at Central Saint Martins, and holds a specialisation in thanatology, the study of death, dying and bereavement. Her early career in fashion included assistant roles at AnOther Magazine, Ibrahim Kamara Studios and Art Partner. Her research work includes image editing on Pomellato 1967 (Rizzoli, 2018) and research on fashion publications for blind readers, later featured in Dr. Simon Hayhoe's Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums (2017).
In 2017, she envisioned her own funeral as a fashion exhibition in Copenhagen, a moment that reframed death as an act of creation. That vision became Cafe Mortel. The name is drawn 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, one of art, contemporary culture, and the objects and experiences that surround loss.
Cohen Love 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