A Personal Promise
The entrance of Faye Toogood’s guest of honour installation at Maison et Objet was covered in posters announcing the designer’s Womanifesto (image: Celia Spenard-Ko).
Womanifesto!, Faye Toogood’s guest of honour installation at the January 2025 edition of Maison et Objet, is not a design manifesto in any conventional sense of the term. It is not, for instance, explicitly outward looking or intended to establish a mode of practice that others should seek to follow, but rather is introspective in nature. “It's a manifesto for myself, in a sense that it's a promise to not hold back,” Toogood explains. “It's a promise to myself to allow the ideas that I'm presenting to come into fruition.”
Set within the exhibition halls of the Paris-based trade fair, Womanifesto!’s exterior is deceptive. The installation is set within a strict box – a typical trade stand – that has subsequently been fly-posted with photographs of Toogood overlaid with sketches and paintings of her furniture work. The visual effect is graphically anarchic, but the space itself remains highly geometric: a standard booth set amongst the commercial hubbub of the fair and its exhibiting brands. This spatial order, however, breaks down the moment one steps inside the booth. “This is my Womanifesto,” reads a text written by Toogood, whose studio is based in north London and works across furniture, art, textiles and fashion. “Self portrait of the brain as an artist. Squishy. Surreal. Sensual. Sexual. Spontaneous.”
Cardboard sunflowers surrounding Toogood’s Gummy armchair and Palette table (image: Celia Spenard-Ko).
Inside Womanifesto!, designed for an edition of Maison et Objet that has been themed “Sur/Reality”, different sections of the installation stretch and bulge around one another. One area is set against a curved painted backdrop of ochre hills and valleys, providing a setting for hand-painted editions of Toogood’s Gummy armchair and Roly Poly chair. This section of the installation spools out in soft curves, before interlocking with an all-black area of the space that is replete with kink-inflected satin and leather editions of the Puffy lounge chair, Solar sofa and Squash armchair. Elsewhere, a wall of scaffolding houses a collection of busts, carved and shaped in different materials and styles, nestled next to Toogood’s fashion design, while another section is fringed by a selection of handmade cardboard sunflowers which crane over the furniture and textiles on display.
“When I was working on this with the studio, I would joke, ‘If you opened up my walnut brain and emptied what was inside, what would it look like?’” Toogood explains. “That's essentially what I'm trying to do here: [show] all the different parts of my subconscious and [allow] all of that to come out.” The sections are titled after elements of or themes within Toogood’s practice (Drawing, Sculpture, Material and Landscape), but the four quickly smudge and blend into one another. The carved, bodily forms of Sculpture find echoes in the drawings and furniture that are spread across the different areas of the installation, while Toogood’s love of British landscape features as exhibition design, but also plays out across the unisex garments executed with her sister Erica, some of which appear to be encrusted with material dredged from the land itself.
Hand-painted versions of Toogood’s Gummy armchair and Roly Poly chair exhibited alongside her Lunar lamp (image: Celia Spenard-Ko).
Womanifesto! has design elements that will be familiar to anyone who has followed Toogood’s career over time (a talent for enveloping, carved forms and a predilection for the handmade), but also spotlights aspects that have hitherto not been foregrounded. The Poking Fun rug is a dick joke transformed into a textile, while Lunar is a suspended paper and wadding light (whose delightfully bizarre aesthetic is simultaneously womb-like and redolent of an IV drip. “I’ve held back parts of the way I work,” explains Toogood. “Things like decoration and colour have not been a part of my work, particularly, and I had actually made a conscious effort at holding those back at a certain point in my career. Now I feel they can flood in. I think about this installation in terms of expression, and the ability to express.”
Many of the elements that Toogood now wishes to foreground, she explains, are traits that have stereotypically been ascribed to women working within design – colour, sensuality and ornamentation. “I grew up as a woman in design in quite a different environment,” Toogood explains, referencing the foundation of her studio in 2008, having previously worked as Interior Editor for The World of Interiors. “For a long time, I felt like I needed to sacrifice part of myself to be part of the design world. Call that part what you like – the anima, the yin, the feminine – [but it’s] that soulful part that is so often framed as emotional, irrational, disorganised, disorderly,” she says. “These are words that I’d argue are still taboo in the design industry. In my career I’ve often felt like an outsider and so to conform and to achieve success I rejected the messy, emotional, touchy-feely stuff. As a result I became an outsider to myself.”
Unisex garments from Toogood’s fashion line hanging above the fleshy Poking Fun rug from her Rude collection with CC Tapis (image: Celia Spenard-Ko).
The personal promise embodied by Womanifesto!, then, is a determination to present a fuller, more accurate representation of her process, interests and approach: the colourful and the monochrome; the soft and the rough carved. “At the beginning of my journey, I would only allow myself to work with strong, hard, heavy materials and processes: steel, stone, welding, security mesh,” Toogood explains. Today, however, she wishes to complement these aspects of her identity with other elements that have not hitherto surfaced publicly. “The body and sexuality and sensuality, all of these things, are part of being human, actually, and I think the point is that I now finally feel comfortable to show that aspect of myself,” she says. “Womanifesto!, like all of my work, strives to be both playful and profound. I wanted to express from my own vantage point the freedom and the change that I have personally felt over the last few years, because it’s only in my most recent work I’ve really felt comfortable enough to fully express my creativity, and confidently acknowledge the emotional side of my work. Even today, applying words like ‘emotional’ or ‘sexual’ to design feels like it’s breaking the rules. As women, we have deprived ourselves of this language.”
Words Oli Stratford