Kering and Phaidon present TheWomanMade.com, an online resource celebrating and supporting the work of women designers past, present and future, inspired by the book Woman Made: Great Women Designers.
Lani Adeoye creates her Bata Stool. Inspired by Yoruba culture, the chair, while woven using traditional methods in collaboration with local artisans, has a strikingly modern shape.
Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan gifts Pope Francis a design by Aljoud Lootah’s studio, established in the city’s design district just four years earlier.
Aljoud Lootah is one of Dubai’s leading designers, creating work that embraces traditional Emirati silhouettes and injects them with modern elements. Here she tells us about her practice.
Lighting designer Rosie Li launches The Pebble Hanging Lamp, inspired by stacked stones, which Li interprets through interlocking planes of machined aluminium, recalling the aesthetic of airplane hulls.
West African designer Moyo Ogunseinde creates her Oko chair, mimicking the hoes she remembers seeing being used in the fields during her childhood in Ibadan, Nigeria.
Denise Scott Brown wins the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, having been passed over by the Pritzker committee when her co-collaborator, Richard Venturi was awarded the prize back in 1991.
British-Nigerian designer Mimi Shodeinde launches her Dip Lounger, crafted from strips of wood shaped and rounded using steam, soon after graduating from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
Kim Colin is appointed ‘Royal Designer for Industry’—the first woman to receive the award. Her and Sam Hecht’s company, Industrial Facility, advocates for a return to care and detail realized through contemporary manufacturing.
Kim Colin was the first woman Royal Designer for Industry. Her work with Industrial Facility combines simplicity, utility and intellectual rigor. This is what she says about it.
Dina Nur Satti takes ceramics classes in New York, and switches from working in non-profits to creating earthy pottery designs influenced by East African cultural traditions and forms.
Dina Nur Satti draws inspiration from her Sudanese and Somali heritage, rooted in ideas of womanhood and community. We asked her about her ceramics.
Faye Toogood creates her Roly-Poly Chair. Its dish-shaped seat on chunky legs gives it a sense of refined childishness. She channels this playful approach into design for clients including Mulberry, Carhartt and Hermès.
Faye Toogood’s practice works across sculpture, furniture, and fashion for clients such as Carhartt, Hermès, and Comme des Garçons. She tells us about her playful, yet serious style.
Hella Jongerius oversees the UN Lounge Chair for the United Nations. At her studio Jongeriuslab, she develops varied approaches to surfaces and color, not only in textiles, but also in ceramics and furniture.
Famous for her colorful Polder Sofa for Vitra, Hella Jongerius’s designs vary wildly from handcrafted one-offs to cabin interiors for KLM. She explains her research-led methodology.
Patricia Urquiola is awarded the Medalla de Oro al Mérito en las Bellas Artes by King Juan Carlos I of Spain. She credits her inspiration to Achille Castiglioni’s concept of ‘tools for living,’ in which objects are used until worn out.
Paris-born designer of Martinique heritage, Marie Burgos, establishes her interior design studio New York City, creating works that draw on mid-century design and the aesthetics of her ancestral home.
Zaha Hadid wins the Pritzker Prize just as her design practice is getting going. Confident in her ability to make the impossible, Hadid sparks a new movement which uses algorithms to push material boundaries.
Mette Hay cofounds the design company HAY with husband Rolf. The couple cite mid-century design duo Ray and Charles Eames as an influence, particularly in respect to their sense of fun and use of color.
Carol Gay establishes her own practice in Sao Paulo, interpretating traditional objects with quirky twists, as in her sculptural lampshade made from playing cards and her distinctive, amorphic glassware.
Samira Rathod founds her eponymous atelier, where the Mumbai-born designer explores experimental processes and whimsical material qualities such as broken brick and waste steel.
Ilse Crawford leaves Elle Decoration to concentrate on projects with Studioilse. She is influenced by her Scandinavian heritage and what she calls ‘the sensory interior.’ Soho House founder Nick Jones is her first client.
Jane Atfield begins work on her pioneering, recycled RCP2 Chair—one of the first designs to champion changing perceptions around sustainable design, emphasizing—rather than disguising—recycled material.
Gae Aulenti, best known for her witty designs for Knoll, Olivetti, and Kartell, transforms the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, winning the Légion d’Honneur—the first woman to be awarded the prize.
Nathalie du Pasquier meets Ettore Sottsass and joins Memphis. Embracing his anti-academicism, she draws upon the graphic signage and bright aesthetics of street life in Gabon where she lived as a late teen.
Grethe Meyer’s Firepot makes its debut. Designed to help working women still doing domestic chores the dish can go straight from freezer to oven to table.
Inspired by the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori, Dorothee Becker designs her Uten.Silo, a wall-mounted organiser for household items, debuting it at the Frankfurt Trade Fair.
India Mahdavi begins attending the progressive Ecole Freinet, near Nice in France, Aged 7, where pottery is regarded as important as maths. A life in the applied arts beckons.
French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand opens Arc 1600, the first part of her masterpiece, the alpine megaresort, Les Arcs. The prefabricated resort in France is her largest work.
Anna Castelli Ferrieri’s Componibili Modular Storage System makes its debut. This stackable unit is one of the first products made using the progressive technology of injection-molded ABS plastic.
Renate Müller receives a gold medal at the Leipzig Trade Fair for her therapeutic toys including jute and leather seals, elephants, giraffes, and bears, intended for balance training and orthopedic exercise.
Trinidad-born, London based designer Althea McNish’s textiles are the subject of a commission by the chairman of Liberty, the famous London department store.
Alison Smithson creates her D38 Trundling Turk I Lounge Chair. It is used in the architect’s Economist Building in London, where it can be wheeled around and placed where needed.
Lucienne Day shows her textile designs at the Festival of Britain, winning over new clients and buyers with her modernist work, which adorn an interior designed by her husband, Robin.
Glass pioneer Gunnel Nyman receives international recognition folllowing her death in 1948, aged 39, when awarded the 1951 Triennale di Milano’s Gold Medal.
Ray Eames’ chair design (co-created with her husband Charles) wins second prize in MoMA’s Low Cost Furniture Competition. However, only Charles receives recognition in MoMA’s press release.
Florence Knoll establishes the Knoll Planning Unit with her husband, Hans Knoll. As co-director of Knoll Associates, she commissions designs that define the pioneering modernism of the age.
Lina Bo Bardi graduates from the Rome College of Architecture at the age of 25, where she presents her degree project, The Maternity and Infancy Care Centre.
Aino Aalto creates her Pressed Glass 4644 for Iittala. Inspired by concentric water ripples, the plate is produced from moulds in a mechanized pressing process, and is still manufactured today.
Anni Albers becomes head of the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus, Germany. Following the closure of the school by the Nazis, she leaves for the U.S. in 1933.
Eileen Gray finishes her masterpiece, E-1027 Villa, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. It is the 51-year-old Irish designer’s first architectural work, and is now regarded as a modernist icon.
Lilly Reich creates the Barcelona Chair with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, for the Barcelona Pavilion. Though they both present the chair, it carries a facsimile of only Mies’s signature.
Austrian designer Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky creates the iconic Frankfurt Kitchen; though apparently no great cook, she undertook time-motion studies with women, feeding their workflow into her design process.
After joining the male-dominated metal workshop at the Bauhaus, Marianne Brandt designs her silver and ebony kettle. Brandt’s gleaming metal and stark geometries were radical, and came to define the Bauhaus aesthetic.
Jutta Sika launches her coffee set with porcelain manufacturer Josef Böck. The founder member of the Wiener Kunst im Hause group radically rethought the relationship between design and production at the turn of the twentieth century.