The Cloakroom by Faye Toogood

London Design Festival 2015, London

Installed at pivotal London Design Festival hub, the V&A, throughout the festival period, British designer Faye Toogood created 150 coats made from Kvadrat’s sculptural upholstery Highfield 2. Taking her cue from fashion, Toogood invited V&A guests to check coats out of the circular-railed cloakroom and wear them whilst exploring the museum’s collections.

The coats also incorporated sewn-in maps that guided wearers to a further 10 specially-commissioned Faye Toogood garments, located throughout the V&A. These individual couture pieces hidden in the galleries took the form of reinterpreted items from the museum’s collections.

Faye Toogood is a British designer. Her furniture and objects demonstrate a preoccupation with materiality and experimentation. All of her pieces are handmade by small-scale fabricators and traditional artisans, with an honesty to the rawness and irregularity of the chosen material.

With an academic training in the theory and practice of fine art, and a vocational background at the forefront of the magazine industry, Toogood approaches product design with a singular and acutely honed eye. Her highly sculptural work, while showing an astute respect for the past, is derived from pure self-expression and instinct.

Toogood’s objects are grouped together into her trademark numbered ‘Assemblages’. This allows her to avoid the formulaic, to experiment with the materials and processes that dominate her thinking at a particular time. With each Assemblage, she engages not only with the products themselves but also with the three-dimensional space in which they are exhibited, working across multiple disciplines to create a single body of work with an intuitive and united narrative.