Toogood

Since founding their eponymous brand in 2013, sisters Faye and Erica Toogood—the former a renowned designer of interiors, furniture, and sculpture, the latter a veteran garment designer with experience in bespoke tailoring, theatre costumes, and pattern cutting—have continuously offered a unisex collection built around extrapolating professions and the uniforms associated with them into silhouettes imbued with a tangible reverence for ritual and praxis. Toogood utilizes the full spectrum of natural fabrics, stretching from linen through cotton and wool, with nods to utility in the judicious application of wax coating and rubber permeation to outerwear. Occasionally, the characteristically broad tableaux that make up every garment are punctuated by splashes of text or daub-like graphics. Evocative of cottage-industry variability, shirts, dresses, and trousers billow out to provide enough space for unrestricted labor to transition seamlessly to leisure. The same seamlessness is mirrored in the brand’s commitment to collapsing the space between end-user and creator, realized through the inclusion of a document of provenance in each item. The document reserves space for the wearer to mark their own name; by doing so, they close the last link of a chain of ownership that often remains stubbornly opaque.