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Design Milk’s Friday Five profile features Toast CEO Suzie de Rohan Willner discussing five influences, including Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa and Philip Johnson’s Glass House. She also describes Toast projects involving community gatherings, performance, garment repair and the Fall/Winter 2026 collection.
Toast CEO Suzie de Rohan Willner has discussed five artists and design landmarks that shape her perspective, alongside recent projects by the clothing brand, in a Design Milk Friday Five profile. The interview connects her interest in craft and experimentation with Toast initiatives focused on repairing, renewing and reusing garments.
Willner names textile artist Anni Albers, sculptor Ruth Asawa, architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House, sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the sculptural doors at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral among her influences. She says Albers’s work showed how textiles could move from traditional craft into recognized art, and describes Albers’s approach as beginning with experimentation and attention to a material’s properties.
Willner connects that idea to Toast’s clothing-reuse initiatives: Toast Repair, Renewed and Reworn. The profile describes these as ways to respond to damaged or unwanted garments through mending, alteration and reuse. In a separate project, Dutch textile artist Meta Struycken designed eight full-size pieces for the first Toast Renewed By capsule, using returned and damaged Toast items and fabric remnants from her studio. The pieces incorporated embroidery, appliqué and quilting.
The interview also covers Toast events and collections. For its Spring/Summer 2026 collection, A Shared Table, the company held a locally produced luncheon on farmland around Llansteffan Castle in Wales, which the article identifies as the brand’s birthplace. A Spring/Summer 2025 event at Somerset House in London included installations and a performance by dancers Francesca Matthys and Masumi Saito. Toast’s Fall/Winter 2026 collection is titled Marking the Turn and draws on seasonal rituals and folk traditions, according to the profile.
How Artistic Influence Shapes Toast
The profile offers a view of how Willner frames craft and experimentation as both personal interests and elements of Toast’s brand approach. Her examples range from Albers’s work with textiles to Asawa’s transformation of wire and Noguchi’s movement among sculpture, furniture, lanterns and public gardens. Together, they show the breadth of the influences she says inform her perspective.
The focus on repair and reuse also gives the interview a practical business angle. Toast presents mending and alteration not just as ways to extend the use of clothing, but as creative work. The Renewed By capsule provides a specific example of that approach, although the profile does not report how many garments the programs have diverted from waste or assess their commercial or environmental impact.
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The Artists and Projects Behind the Interview
Willner tells Design Milk that growing up in a creative family helped develop her appreciation for art, design and craftsmanship. The article also recounts how Toast Creative Director Laura Shippey introduced her to the work of painter Lee Krasner. Willner says she was struck by Krasner’s practice of breaking up earlier works and using their fragments in new compositions, which she sees as resonant with reworking existing materials.
The five inspirations span different disciplines. Willner describes the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, as a building whose full-height glass walls connect its interior with the landscape. She calls her stepfather, William Mitchell, a pioneer of concrete as an artistic medium and points to his sculptural doors at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. The profile presents these examples as personal influences, not as a ranking or an exhaustive account of her design references.
“She believed design is learned through direct experimentation with material. She asked what the material wanted to do before asking how it should look.”
— Suzie de Rohan Willner, on Anni Albers
What the Profile Does Not Measure
The interview is a first-person account of Willner’s influences and Toast’s projects, not an independent evaluation of their results. It does not give participation, sales or repair-volume figures for Toast Repair, Renewed or Reworn, nor does it quantify the environmental effects of those programs. The source also does not provide the profile’s publication date, and it does not specify when the Fall/Winter 2026 collection will become available.
Toast’s Upcoming Collection Plans
The profile identifies Marking the Turn as Toast’s Fall/Winter 2026 collection, with pieces drawing on seasonal gatherings, folk traditions and handcraft techniques. It does not announce a launch date or provide further release details. The article also documents Toast’s Spring/Summer 2026 luncheon and its earlier Spring/Summer 2025 Somerset House event; no additional events or project milestones are confirmed in the supplied report.
Key Questions
What did Suzie de Rohan Willner discuss with Design Milk?
She described five artistic and architectural influences and discussed recent Toast projects, including garment-reuse work, collection events and upcoming designs.
Which five influences did Willner name?
Her list includes Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, Isamu Noguchi and the sculptural doors at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral by William Mitchell.
What is Toast Renewed By?
The profile describes its first capsule as eight full-size pieces designed by Dutch textile artist Meta Struycken using returned and damaged Toast items and studio fabric remnants.
What is Toast’s Fall/Winter 2026 collection called?
It is titled Marking the Turn. The profile says it draws on seasonal rituals, folk traditions and handcraft techniques, but does not give a release date.
Source: rss
