During this year’s London Design Festival, visitors to the V&A will be transformed into temporary custodians via Faye Toogood’s new installation, The Cloakroom. They are invited on a journey of discovery through the Museum’s collections, simply by checking out and wearing one of 150 Toogood coats from the Cloakroom.

Situated in the Clore Study Area in the British Galleries, a circular rail dispenses a selection of coats specially designed for the installation in Kvadrat’s Highfield, a high-tech compressed-foam textile. The sense of uniformity fostered by these garments is subverted by customised mask designs painted on their backs, rendering each one simultaneously individual yet anonymous. Maps are sewn into each coat, guiding visitors to a further 10 variations on the overcoat theme in diverse locations around the V&A. Each of these are specially commissioned sculptures that interpret and deconstruct specific items from the Museum’s collections.

The 10 sculptures are created using different, unexpected media – ranging from studded industrial rubber to intricately carved marble – drawing on the unparalleled expertise of 10 British manufacturers, both well-established and up-and-coming. Reflecting and renewing the rich history of design that surrounds them, these individual couture pieces will be hidden in the galleries ready to be discovered.

Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7
19th to the 27th of September 2015
10.00 - 17.45 daily
10.00 - 22.00 Friday

The genteel traditions of the English drawing room have been redrafted by designer Faye Toogood for a new installation at Somerset House during the London Design Festival in September. Visitors to the building are invited to relax in an environment that evokes a derelict country house – although in this case the surrounds have been literally drawn in, as charcoal sketches on the translucent plastic sheets that line the walls.

The furniture is an intriguing combination of antiques, abstracted cardboard sculptures and reassuringly chunky contemporary pieces drawn from Toogood’s recent “Roly-Poly” collection, remodelled for the occasion in charcoal-hued fibreglass. A sense of rustic abandonment is added by a handwoven rug strung together from fragments of felt, tarpaulin and clingfilm, while stray chickens and ducks – rendered in cardboard origami – mingle with the visitors.

Somerset House, The Strand, London WC2R
21st to the 27th of September 2015
Mon- Wed, Sun 10am- 6pm
Thu- Sat 10am- 9pm

Two cultures are fused together by the serene act of pouring. A shared history of brewed leaves, of porcelain, of the intricacy and intimacy of the tea ceremony. It is a moment of calm that crosses continents to find reassuring shape in British designer Faye Toogood’s new range of ceramics for Tokyo’s furniture label, E&Y. Part of E&Y’s Edition Horizontal collaboration, the “Pots” collection fuses traditional Japanese forms with a distinctly English sensibility. Three table vessels, in differing proportions – Tall, Volume and Flat – but with a unifying rounded aesthetic, are fashioned in dark hagi stoneware coated with a white thick glaze that evokes drips of milk.

The vessels stand on chunky tripod legs and are equipped with lipped spouts for pouring and urn-like lids on which the unfinished stoneware peeks through. Hand-made by Japanese artisans working with traditional techniques, this collection will be premiered at the Design Museum during London Design Week in September 2015.

Design Museum
19th to the 27th of September 2015
10.00- 17.45 daily
Last admission 17.15