Infinite Smocking

At the TOAST shop on the Upper East Side of New York hang three large-scale textiles by Annie Coggan, made from cotton canvas and remnant TOAST fabrics which have been gathered and stitched by hand into ordered grids of smocking. As the light moves across them, shadows reveal the care and precision of their making. Together they form ‘Infinite Smocking’, an installation that explores how architectural ideas can be expressed through cloth.

The presentation also marks a new chapter for TOAST in New York. Earlier this year, TOAST’s twenty-fifth shop, and its fourth in the United States, opened at 1221 Madison Avenue. Once home to Schrafft’s restaurant, the building sits one block from Central Park and close to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. Since May, the space has become a thoughtful setting for the uptown community, offering bespoke appointments and private styling sessions alongside exhibitions and events. Until Tuesday 4 November, it will be home to ‘Infinite Smocking’.

For Annie, working with textiles evolved naturally from her background in architecture. “I’m trained as an architect and practised in Brooklyn and New York for about fifteen or twenty years,” she says. The steady pace of residential work once defined her days until, as she recalls, “when COVID hit, small-scale residential practice went by the wayside.” Teaching, which had long run alongside her practice, became her main focus. “I’d always been teaching, so I took a full-time job at the Pratt Institute, which is a big responsibility,” she says. “But I’ve always had a research practice of making furniture and experimenting with textiles, doing upholstery work.”

Her turn towards fabric was gradual and grounded in the same sense of material logic that guided her architectural work. “Textiles were a way for me to get at ideas without a table saw or a drill,” she says. The act of stitching offered a different kind of construction, something she could work on at her kitchen table while her daughter was young, yet still explore questions of form and space. “I’m a maker and a builder, and textiles just were something I could mess around with. For a long time I was doing embroidery, because it has this amazing relationship to drawing.”

Over time, embroidery led her to smocking, a technique of gathering and tensioning cloth that appealed to her sense of geometry. “It’s really like model making, architectural model making,” she says. “It’s about making spaces, or making shapes or forms. It has a visual relationship to all the tessellation and things that computers can do. But what’s great is that I can do it!”

Scale and structure became central to her practice. “Because the architect’s job is to take two-dimensional into three-dimensional,” she explains. “With smocking, a two-dimensional surface isn’t enough. We have to bring the fabric into a volume.” The folds of ‘Infinite Smocking’ reflect that impulse, to test what happens when structures begin to form from cloth.

Annie’s studio, housed in the old Pfizer building at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, gives her both space and focus. Once painting studios, the rooms retain their generous light and plain walls. “I did fine arts in college, so I feel really comfortable in it because it’s not office-y. It’s like a painting studio,” she says. “As I’m making these really big architectural smocking pieces, the white walls and natural light are a dream.” The simplicity of the space allows the work to take centre stage and gives enough room to work with great swathes of fabric.

Teaching remains closely connected to her making and informs both her process and reflection. At Pratt, she coordinates the junior interior studio and teaches on historic houses and speculative spaces. “Textiles are so intertwined with historic information,” she says. “I have a research agenda which is about historic interiors, and the textiles dip in with that.” The classroom becomes another kind of workshop, a place where ideas are tested.

Through precise stitches, Annie gives fabric a new spatial language, and the three-dimensional forms, magnified on a grand scale, invite contemplation. Her way of thinking remains rooted in the principles of her first discipline, she says. “I think like an architect in textiles.”

Infinite Smocking by Annie Coggan is on view at TOAST New York Upper East Side, 1221 Madison Avenue, New York City, until Tues 4 November 2025.

Words by Alice Simkins Vyce.

Photographs by Ash Bean.