Womanifesto, Faye Toogood’s exhibition at Maison & Objet 2025 – All photos are by Celia Spenard-Ko.
Design. Maison & Objet named Faye Toogood Designer of the Year 2025. The British designer crashes into the Parisian fair with the exhibition Womanifesto: Ceci n’est pas un Chaise, a surrealist re-assemblage of her archive that captures the spirit of her studio and reflects on her career as a woman in the design industry. Plush furniture, fashion, rugs, sculptures, and objects plunge visitors into a whimsical, dreamlike maze that recalls sunsets and rugged landscapes.
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“This is my Womanifesto. Self-portrait of the brain as an artist. Squishy. Surreal. Sensual. Sexual. Spontaneous. Turning the studio of my subconscious inside out.” Explained Faye Tologood.
The exhibition tunes with the Parisian fair’s overarching theme, Neo-Surrealism. “Surreality is the human ability to take creativity beyond the usual boundaries. Womanifesto delves deeply into my eccentric side. It goes beyond objects to show a creative process.”
Womanifesto is ‘disorganised’ into collapsing chapters – DRAWING. MATERIAL. SCULPTURE. LANDSCAPE – four bouncy-castle pillars. Past collaborations are revisited with site-specific, ephemeral artworks and reinvented Toogood icons. Highlights include the 2014 Roly Poly chair, the 2024 Gummy collection, and more.
A dramatic monochromatic SCULPTURE room showcases Toogood’s innovations in shape. A library of beloved MATERIALS features a series of sculpted heads, new fashion works and curated objects.
The DRAWING room is about speed and communication more than a finished work of art: “the pulse of a scribble.” For the LANDSCAPE section, the designer created a forest of hand-made, tree-sized cardboard sunflowers, showcasing the constant and enduring landscape influence across collections and collaborations.
The Womanifesto exhibition is about being a woman in an industry ruled by men. “I think Roly-Poly helped me to understand what a woman designer is. I’m approaching 50. Let’s face it, when I started out, there were very few recognised women in this profession. It was a male environment, and it still is, including in the industry.”
“Zaha Hadid and Patricia Urquiola were role models for me. The feminism of my generation made a point of not worrying about the distinction between men and women in order to move forward. That’s how it was: not taking account of the fact of being a woman. Now, the third generation of feminists is asserting its difference, which is very interesting.”
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All photos of Womanifesto: Ceci n’est pas un Chaise by Faye Toogood x Maison & Objet 2025 are by Anne Emmanuelle Thion, courtesy of Maison & Objet.
