Assemblage by Faye Toogood

“I knew in my heart that I wanted to change my aesthetic. I sat in my studio and got clay, paper, and wire, and with my team started to make childlike, quite crude maquettes. We made hundreds and hundreds of them, then selected 17 to make into real-size pieces. I told my team, ”This is the show.” They thought we would then develop the shapes, but that primitive folk naïve quality was what I really wanted. This is my new vocabulary.” —Faye Toogood, Assemblage 6: Unlearning

Fashion designer and artist Faye Toogood’s ongoing design project, Assemblage, shown here in a handsome, understated volume. Her creative team—spanning both her fashion atelier and design studio—undertook the serious play of making a series of maquettes with tape, cardboard, wire and canvas, resulting in almost 300 experimental pieces. 17 of these pieces were chosen to be replicated at full scale, with all of their singular imperfections intact. 

These items form the basis of a new approach to design for Faye—a praxis that holds the first spark of creative action as not only foundational, but as raw material for making. A short fiction by author Sophie Mackintosh opens the work, while a concluding essay by writer and curator Glenn Adamson reflects on the objects and Toogood’s practice as a whole.

2021, English
Author: Faye Toogood
Published by: Apartamento Publishing
Softcover, 5.5”x8.5”, 448pp, full color