Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.For a long time, I thought I needed to sacrifice part of myself to be in the design world. Call it what you like — the anima, the yin, the feminine . . . That soulful part so often framed as emotional. Irrational. Disorganised. Disorderly. Words that are still taboo in the design industry. In my career I’ve often felt like an outsider, so to conform and achieve success I rejected the messy, emotional, touchy-feely stuff. As a result, I became an outsider to myself. Yet I’m one of the “lucky” ones. Depending on which study you read, I’m among around 20 per cent of working designers in the UK who are female. Last week, as part of design fair Maison & Objet, I was honoured as Designer of the Year. I called my exhibition Womanifesto! A title that is a little tongue in cheek, but mostly a celebration of the side of my practice I once felt that I had to keep under wraps. When I began my career as a furniture designer 25 years ago, there were very few women in the field. Tom Dixon had been a big encouragement, telling me to “stop throwing things in the bin” and make something more permanent. He was one of the era’s design pin-ups, alongside Ron Arad, Jasper Morrison, Ross Lovegrove and Marc Newson. It’s not that there were no women; Paola Navone, Zaha Hadid and Patricia Urquiola were creating wonderful furniture as an offshoot to their architectural practices, but it wasn’t given much attention compared with their bigger projects. Growing up in the 1980s, I studied the work of Cindy Sherman. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood was seminal. I was galvanised by Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. I lived through ladette culture. I found myself reacting to the world around me in a physical way. I adopted a uniform of white. Dressed androgynously. Cut off my hair and dyed what was left of it white. I decided to remove all colour and decoration from my work. I vowed never to take up textiles or ceramics — the disciplines so long deemed “women’s work”. In stripping away any association with “the decorative arts”, my studio and style became defined as minimalist. I had achieved a sort of radical rebirth in destroying all the colour, decoration and softness. I would only work with strong, hard, heavy materials and processes. Steel. Stone. Welding. Security mesh. I was seeking a pure geometry. I established a fashion brand with my sister, creating clothes that ignored age and gender — a much less commonplace idea even 12 years ago. I hated the idea of labelling myself. Designer? Artist? Multidisciplinary? Polymath? Whatever. I just wanted to experiment. But I started to realise that I felt like an outsider — outside of the art world, the design world and the fashion world. When I became pregnant, I hid my bump under a huge shirt and an oversized men’s jacket. I ran back to work 10 weeks after giving birth and the results were catastrophic. But I wanted to show no weakness. I was terrified of being kicked out of the gents’ club. I ran back to work 10 weeks after giving birth and the results were catastrophic. But I wanted to show no weakness. I was terrified of being kicked out of the gents’ club This experience changed my life and my work. I made the Roly Poly chair: so much plumper, fuller and softer than anything I had designed before. In the past 10 years, Roly Poly has had a life of her own. She’s the piece I am most associated with, and has earned a place in homes and institutions all over the world. But she wasn’t an overnight success. A lot of people in the design world were dismissive of the “new” me. Recently, there have been some fantastic exhibitions, books and magazines dedicated to women in design. But the numbers are still grim; the latest Design Council report found that 23 per cent of designers identify as female, an increase of only 1 per cent since 2015. The overwhelming majority of those people are white and cisgendered. Design Week found a 20 per cent gender pay gap. Kerning the Gap found 67 per cent of design graduates are women but only 17 per cent of creative directors. There was a time when I thought it was patronising to be labelled a female designer. Why couldn’t I simply be a designer? These are complicated feelings, straddling and riding second, third, fourth waves of feminism and beyond. I feel I need to step up for the women designers behind me and make sure there is a path for them to express themselves in their work.Emotional does not mean unprofessional. We all need to probe the possibilities for the future. I am fascinated by what creative revolution we may see in response to AI’s coming-of-age. Let us use design as an act of grounding in this tumultuous time. Let us celebrate design that unites play and handmade craft. Let design help us find meaning in the objects that we surround ourselves with. Rigorous but humane should be everyone’s Womanifesto!Faye Toogood is the founder of design studio ToogoodFind out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
