Women designers who changed design

Women have shaped design in every age, but for a long time without having their names on the objects. Clara Driscoll designed Tiffany’s famous lamps, Karin Larsson furnished the home at Sundborn, Gunta Stölzl led the Bauhaus weaving workshop and Marianne Brandt made its best-known metal objects. Eileen Gray and Charlotte Perriand shaped the furniture of Modernism, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky the modern kitchen and Gabrielle Chanel modern clothing. After the war came designers such as Maija Isola and Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe.

Facts

Around 1900: the workshops and the home

Clara Driscoll led the department at Tiffany Studios in which some thirty women cut and soldered the glass, and she designed lamps such as the Dragonfly lamp and the Wisteria lamp. For a long time they were attributed to Louis Comfort Tiffany himself; only letters found in 2005 revealed her role.

In Glasgow Margaret Macdonald worked with gesso, metal and textiles and, together with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, furnished rooms such as the Willow Tea Rooms. In Sweden Karin Larsson designed the textiles and many of the pieces of furniture in the home at Sundborn, and in England Gertrude Jekyll planted borders by colour like a painter.

The fashion houses

Some of the first great fashion houses were run by women. Jeanne Paquin opened in Paris in 1891 and headed the fashion section at the World’s Fair of 1900. Jeanne Lanvin began with a hat shop in 1889, and her fashion house is the oldest in Paris still in existence; her robe de style of the 1920s was full and romantic. In London Lucile introduced fashion shows with live models.

Gabrielle Chanel opened her first shop in 1910 and used jersey and simple cuts that had previously belonged to underwear and sportswear. The little black dress of 1926 and the jersey suit became some of the most copied garments of the 20th century.

The Bauhaus and Modernism

Gunta Stölzl was the only female master at the Bauhaus and led the weaving workshop in 1926–1931, where she moved from unique textiles to prototypes for industry. Marianne Brandt made teapots from geometric basic forms in the metal workshop, such as the MT 49 teapot of 1924, and the Kandem bedside lamp of 1928 made her one of the first women to design for industry.

Eileen Gray began with Japanese lacquer in Paris and moved on to tubular steel and glass; the villa E-1027 on the Mediterranean, which she designed and furnished, is one of the best-known houses of Modernism. Charlotte Perriand designed the tubular-steel furniture LC2–LC4 together with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in 1928 and later worked with wood and bamboo after a period in Japan.

The modern kitchen and the coffee filter

The architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926 for the new housing in Frankfurt. She measured how housewives moved and arranged the kitchen as a workplace, to save steps. Around ten thousand kitchens were built, and the idea of the rational kitchen spread across Europe.

One of the most widely used objects of all came from a home in Dresden. Melitta Bentz wanted coffee without grounds, made holes in a brass tin and placed a sheet of paper in it, and in 1908 she obtained protection for her filter holder. The company that took her first name still exists.

The Nordic countries after the war

Märta Måås-Fjetterström opened her weaving workshop at Båstad in 1919, and her rugs in rölakan and flossa renewed the Swedish rug. After her death the workshop continued with designers such as Barbro Nilsson and Marianne Richter. In Finland Maija Isola made hundreds of patterns for Marimekko, and Unikko of 1964 became the company’s emblem.

The silversmith Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe made simple jewellery close to the body in silver and steel, such as the wristwatch Vivianna for Georg Jensen in 1962. In the United States Ray Eames, with her feeling for colour and form, left her mark on everything that came from the Eames Office, from furniture to films.

Why the names were missing

Many women worked in workshops and studios where a man’s name was on the door, or in couples where the man received the credit. The Bauhaus long steered women towards the weaving workshop rather than architecture, and the seamstresses, painters and glass cutters of the fashion houses and factories remained anonymous.

Today research has given many of them their names back. More designers, men and women, can be found in the list of designers.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who designed the Frankfurt Kitchen of 1926, the first modern kitchen planned as a workplace?