British designer Faye Toogood is the interiors whizz who decks fashion boutiques out with their beloved Roly Poly and Puffy chairs. She keeps members of the art world in unisex utility jackets. Her homes have become the definition of house porn, owing to her partner Matt Gibberd’s business (the little known minimalist luxury estate agency, The Modern House). But the multi-disciplinary artist – who effortlessly straddles the notoriously-hard-to-penetrate spheres of design and counts Comme des Garçons, Hermès and Mulberry as clients – doesn’t bother herself with the business of fashion. She is not a disciple of trends, nor does she read about them. Rather, Toogood is interested in clothing as a form of identity, in society’s propensity for uniforms, in garments as sculpture, in abandoning all notions of tailoring tradition, in colour and in textiles. In fact, despite once cutting off and bleaching her hair and pledging to only wear white, the tastemaker has rarely considered the arc of her personal style. Until British Vogue came probing.
“It’s interesting how style evolves for some people, but, for me, it’s always been connected to what’s going on in my world – [both internally and externally],” explains Toogood, serene in buttery neutrals, as the bustle of her 2008-founded eponymous studio plays out behind her on Zoom. That period of colourless austerity, for example, followed the birth of her daughter Indigo and then twins Wren and Etta. “It was ridiculous really, but it somehow made sense – this idea of a uniform, which played out in my whole life”. (The couple described their Highgate home at the time as a “minimalist folk” oasis.) Recently, Toogood has revamped the family’s country residence with a cacophony of patterns that reflect her desire for more vibrancy. “I’m not necessarily doing it all deliberately,” she muses of the chameleonic effect, which is somewhat at odds with her singular bulbous furniture. “I guess I quite like the idea of reinvention. Other people like consistency and I like the theatre change…”
When pressed, Faye, now 47, roots her interest in identity in an early fascination with Cindy Sherman, whose shape-shifting self-portraiture she pored over while studying art history in Bristol. Clothes, you see, had never been a thing growing up in rural Rutland, where Toogood curated feathers, eggs and beetles on her bedside table. Bought on a shoestring from charity shops, it was only later, at university, that Faye realised she had, in a sense, been inhabiting other people’s personas by wearing their old garments. Her obsession with vintage grew and she developed a magpie eye for excellent cuts and beautiful fabrics that told stories about the past. To interview for a prop stylist role at The World of Interiors, the then-21-year-old packed a suitcase full of fabric cuttings and was hired on the spot. She rose up the ranks to interiors editor, and saved up her modest salary to buy Dries Van Noten after studying the seasonal lookbooks for hours.
Faye’s foray into furniture design upon leaving the magazine to set up Studio Toogood turned her attention to outfitting others, as she and her pattern-cutter sister, Erica, kitted out the staff involved in her immersive exhibitions. The siblings’ biggest project to date involved hanging 49 gigantic coats splashed with old car paint around Covent Garden’s Seven Dials to celebrate British trades loved and lost. The pair’s 2013-founded fashion brand, Toogood, was based on the same premise: to create clothes with purpose, inspired by the industries that have propped up British culture. “I guess it was a bit of a grandiose idea,” reminisces Faye of initially making eight coats they thought might pique the interest of designer friends. “None of us were interested in wearing brands at the time…”
Nowadays, Toogood hits reset on her wardrobe every six months. Just as some might pack away their winter clothes in favour of a lighter, brighter summer proposition, Faye maps out the season ahead based on colour and textiles. “I might only want to wear blue,” she clarifies. “Or I might want to just feel comfortable in the countryside. It’s also an efficiency thing. I am quite OCD and everything has its place. I never spend more than 10 to 15 minutes getting dressed.”
Precision, however, is overridden by playfulness. Toogood is frequently stopped on the street with requests to stroke the rustling fabrics that comprise her signature Photographer jacket (Faye owns too many of these to count, and loyal clients also purchase them in their tens). “There’s often a humorous element or something that’s a bit off,” she laughs. “Often you will see me wearing something very big. There’s a sense of the unexpected…” Not least because Faye actively goes out of her way to distort the dress codes of events that clamour for the artist’s attendance.
Toogood’s only critics are her children, who naturally thrive off consistency, and her husband, who is always on hand to provide an opinion which his wife may or may not listen to. Her studio staffers, who end up gravitating towards the same uniform, flow with the tides, as their restless “tinkerer” of a leader truffles out the unique. “It is nearly impossible for young people to own their identities in a singular way now, because they don’t live in a bubble the way we used to,” says the softly-spoken woman whose favourite part of the job is seeing how shoppers distort the collections – or “toolbox” – she presents them with. Currently enjoying a creative high, the plan is to funnel every element of Toogood’s expansive world into a space where fellow seekers of individualism can collectively experience all her ideas. Faye Toogood may or may not have bleached blonde hair when you visit, but she will still be quietly celebrating the anti-signature look, and the joy of dressing exactly how you want when you want.
