Isabel Toledo, the Cuban American fashion designer with an avant-garde flair who created Michelle Obama’s distinctive lemongrass- colored sheath dress and matching overcoat for her husband Barack’s 2009 inauguration, has died. She was 59.

Toledo died of breast cancer, her studio said in an email on Monday.

She presented her first collection in 1985, but Toledo’s work grabbed particular attention after Obama became a fan and then wore the distinctive wool and lace outfit to the inauguration when Barack Obama became America’s first African-American president, drawing massive crowds to Washington and a worldwide TV audience.

Isabel Toledo created former first lady Michelle Obama’s standout dress and matching overcoat for Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Photograph: Charles Dharapak/Associated Press

Actors Demi Moore, Debi Mazar and Debra Messing are among celebrities who have worn Toledo’s creations, both on screen and on red carpets.

Toledo arrived in West New York, a town in northern New Jersey, from Cuba as a teenager, later attending, but not graduating, from fashion college in New York. She met her collaborator and husband, the illustrator and painter Ruben Toledo, in high school.

She was an independent designer who later eschewed runways for museum exhibitions, starting in the late 1990s and served briefly as creative director for Anne Klein, from 2006 to 2007..

The color of Obama’s Toledo-created inauguration look took on a life of its own in the fashion world.

Descriptions of the color changed all day during the inauguration, leaving those who had to write about it wondering how to describe it. Was it yellow? Apple green? Toledo called it “lemongrass,” a grass grown in tropical regions that has lemon-scented foliage and is a favorite in Thai cooking.

“I called it ‘lemongrass’ because it’s not yellow, it’s not green,” Toledo told the Associated Press at the time.

She said she preferred “non-color” colors. The fact that colors on textiles can take on changing tones is an important element when making clothes, Toledo added.

“The idea that the coat and dress are gold to some, pale yellow to others ... gives that moment you happen to catch sight of it that much more depth,” she said. “It gives the wearer and the viewer much more of an individualized experience.”