Designer Faye Toogood on conquering the world of trainers

What do you do, love?’ A standard enough cabbie question, but one that Faye Toogood slightly dreads. Same with ‘occupation’ boxes on forms, or in fact any enquiry as to her line of work. It’s not that what she does is secret or controversial, it’s just hard to summarise succinctly. Furniture designer, fashion entrepreneur, interiors guru, artist… ‘I usually choose the generic “designer” tag,’ she says, ‘because it is very difficult to find the terminology to describe what I am doing at any one time.’

Indeed, the list of current projects she reels off is exhausting. At the centre of it all is Toogood: the unisex, utilitarian-but-high-end label that Faye, 40, runs with her younger sister, Erica. Having launched just four years ago, it is stocked in Selfridges, Dover Street Market and numerous international boutiques, with their first store — on Redchurch Street — having just opened. Meanwhile, as a renowned furniture maker, Toogood’s latest collection was recently shown at New York’s Friedman Benda gallery, while some of her older designs were exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art earlier this year. And on the interiors front, she is overseeing three major residential projects in London, while also working on Mulberry’s global refit of all its shops. Which seems like plenty to be getting on with. But there is another new avenue that we are here to discuss, namely, trainers.

Well, not really trainers. In collaboration with innovative New York footwear label FEIT (pronounced ‘fight’), Toogood is releasing the Artist Shoe, a new collection that combines natural materials with handmade techniques. They are not the sort of thing you would ever wear to the gym, that’s for sure. But in FEIT, Toogood has found a kindred spirit. ‘As soon as I saw FEIT shoes I had to have them,’ she recalls. ‘I actually bought a brilliant white pair, then promptly spilt a large cup of American coffee over them. The owner of the shop felt so sorry for me she swapped her own FEITs for my ruined ones. So I guess I ended up literally buying the shoes off her feet.’

This might be why the Toogood versions are made in primed artists’ canvas. ‘See them as a blank canvas,’ she says. ‘You can spill things on them and paint on them.’ One of the designs, in fact, already features a paint pattern by Toogood’s four-year-old daughter, Indigo, whose picture ‘Pigs in Mud’ is used across the latest collection. Evidently, she is showing some of her mother’s artistic tendencies. ‘There are definitely dangerous signs of it,’ jokes Toogood. ‘She’s got the artist’s temper already.’

Toogood credits her own creative flair to her childhood in rural Rutland. ‘We didn’t have a TV until I was nine, so the only option was our imaginations,’ she says. Her mother was a florist, her father worked in pharmaceuticals, and they instilled in Erica and Faye a love for — and a deep understanding of — the great outdoors. ‘Our upbringing was very much about nature and ornithology, collecting and foraging,’ says Toogood. Today the sisters champion transparency in production and honesty in materials. She even says they see themselves not as fashion designers, but as farmers. ‘We want to be able to take a product to market and explain to people exactly where and how it has been made. That is really important. Many people wouldn’t buy food if they didn’t know where it had come from. We’re not there with fashion yet.’

It is easy to assume that designers who have such a strong focus on provenance and transparency are somehow anti-fashion. But while the Toogood sisters will not be found filling a Primark basket any time soon, they are not against either the high street or the glamorous, more gratuitous side of fashion. ‘I think the “anti” part of what we are doing is about the treadmill of fashion,’ she says. ‘It feels like in the past decade or two the fashion train has just been moving so fast, and we are simply refusing to get on it. At Toogood we are going to do things our way — the slow way.’ Being entirely self-funded makes such independence easier. ‘We can take risks, we can go at our own pace, and we can spend as much money as we like on Christmas cards,’ she says.

Toogood now lives in Highgate, in a 1960s house designed by Walter Segal, which features entirely white interiors (when I ask her how this works with her artistically inclined daughter, she says, ‘You can just paint over anything: it’s all jammy-hand proof.’) Her husband, Matt, runs The Modern House estate agency, which specialises in architecturally distinct homes. They met while they were working on World of Interiors magazine, and so it’s not a surprise to discover that they love mooching around Livingstone Studio in Hampstead together, or the Sir John Soane’s Museum, or the Barbican’s Garden Room, looking for architectural inspiration.

Toogood is today wearing one of her label’s simple smock tops and voluminous overcoats, in a way that makes you want to pull them from her shoulders. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the designs; worn in the right way, there is plenty of wow.

‘So much of fashion today is difficult to wear, which is why people might spend a fortune on it, but then live in a jumper and jeans,’ she points out. ‘What we have created is a uniform for ourselves.’ She is also aware people can be turned off by the unisex tag. ‘I think because the clothes are unisex, people assume we dress like boys, but we have moved on from Nineties androgyny. You wear it as you like; I love jewellery and I love nail varnish and I love make-up too,’ she counters. Faye Toogood is clearly just a something-of-everything kind of person.

(t-o-o-g-o-o-d.com; feitdirect.com)