Toogood SHIRT

Since establishing their namesake label in 2013, sisters Faye and Erica Toogood—the former a designer of interiors, furniture, and sculpture, the latter a veteran clothing designer with experience in bespoke tailoring, theatre costumes, and pattern making—have continuously offered a unisex line conceived around extrapolating professions and the uniforms related to them into silhouettes with palpable reverence for ritual and praxis. Toogood employs the full spectrum of natural textiles, spanning linens through cottons and wools, with nods to utilitarianism in the prudent application of rubber permeation and wax coating to a range of workwear-inspired jackets, coats, and capes. Occasionally, the distinctively broad tableaux that make up every Toogood garment are punctuated with splashes of text or daub-like graphics. Redolent of cottage-industry variance, men’s shirting, overalls, jeans, and trousers provide ample room for unrestricted labor to transition seamlessly to leisure. The same seamlessness is mirrored in the label’s dedication to conflating the space between end-user and creator, realized through the inclusion of a document of provenance with each item. The document reserves space for the wearer to mark their own name; by doing so, they close the last link in a chain of ownership that often remains stubbornly opaque.