Faye Toogood has designs on your kitchenware
Drop Faye Toogood’s name by all means (everyone else does). But look after her crockery
Faye Toogood has been described as “one of the most prominent women in contemporary design today”. Also: “among the great form-givers of the 21st century”. Working across furniture, fashion, sculpture and “objects”, Toogood is presumably the only designer to have created interiors for Hermès and Opening Ceremony who also has a line of unisex clothing in Selfridges and armchairs and tables in the permanent collections of museums around the world. Her Roly-Poly chair, which resembles the bottom half of a piggy bank and comes in various materials including resin, bronze and crystal barium glass, is considered a classic of contemporary design.
Last year, for a new exhibition — she’s also an artist — Toogood announced she was changing direction. Guided by a principle she called “unlearning”, she exhibited work that “doggedly [stuck] to [the] naivete” of the prototype maquettes it was designed on, exhibiting sofas, lights and tables that seemed to have been zapped with a growth ray, complete with “thumb prints”, “paper creases” and “modelling wire” legs, alongside the three-inch originals they meticulously recreated. Parsing Picasso’s idea that children are all born artists, but as adults we forget how to play, she aimed to tap into the spontaneous creativity of youth — Toogood had recently become a mum to twins — before any second-guessing that can lead to the selfreferential “hall of mirrors” that contemporary design sometimes represents.
Something of that spirit surely informs Toogood Homeware, her new collection for the home that launches this spring. It is split between two lines, Dough (mugs, jugs, bowls) and Plough (geometric throws). The Dough range is based on imperfect, hand-thrown pottery, with a pleasing plumpness that recalls watching bread rise in the oven. The two Plough throws take inspiration from the handmade craft of traditional weavers, plus the look of freshly ploughed country fields.
“The inspiration first came whilst I was exploring items from the kitchen,” Toogood explains. “The soft volumes of rising dough and handshaped leavened pastries.”
If Esquire had any niggles it would be whether the world was yet ready for anything that reminded us of lockdown baking. Also: how items of such minimalistic and calming beauty might look in our occasionally less than minimal and calm homes. Thankfully, you imagine Toogood, a former senior stylist at The World of Interiors magazine, would be able to advise. Yeah, she did that too. ○