Charlotte Perriand arrived at Le Corbusier’s studio at age 24, asking for a chance to work. The response, shouted across the room, was blunt: “We do not embroider pillows here.” The year was 1927. Perriand soon proved herself as a transformative furniture designer, yet she remained shadowed by the larger-than-life Corbusier and the legacy of Eileen Gray. Similar patterns recur across design history, where bold women quietly navigated male-dominated spaces while their contributions were dimmed or forgotten.
A parallel story unfolds with Galina Balashova, the designer who led interiors on Soviet ships and space stations in the 1960s. Her role was often downplayed, her status reduced to that of a security guard in the paperwork. In the early 1950s, Pratt Institute graduates known as the “design girls” were hired by General Motors to craft car interiors and used as living advertisements. René, a designer at the Bauhaus, created a famous carpet No. 2 in the office of the school’s director Walter Gropius, with the textile department demanding a feminine touch. His broader dream, however, was to become an architect.
The design world holds countless stories like these, the lives of women who were pushed to the margins and then rediscovered. The exhibition HERE A FEW! Gifts in design.1900- Avui, a collaboration between the Vitra Design Museum and Disseny Hub Barcelona, invites visitors to explore until next January 7 the pioneers of 20th-century design from a gendered lens.
The museum presents a survey of eighty designers through a gender-focused lens, including Jeanne Toussaint, long-serving creative director at Cartier, Annika Rimala of Marimekko, and Lina Bo Bardi. It also features fifty Catalan creators, among them Nina Masó, Nani Marquina, Núria Pié Barrufet, Mireia Riera Simon, Mont Marsà and Anna Calvera, highlighting a regional dimension to the broader story.
Where are the women?
The Vitra section, shaped by curators Vivianne Stappmanns, Nina Steinmüller and Susanne Graner, began as a response to a broader question: why do most pieces in the collection come from male designers? A search for hidden female designers began, and the results reveal compelling episodes that challenge traditional notions of what a designer does and how design history is written.
DIY queen
Louise Brigham, writing in 1909, published Box Furniture, a practical guide to crafting furniture from wooden fruit boxes. It became a bestseller, especially among recent immigrants in the United States who faced economic hardship. Brigham eventually opened a school and earned a lasting place in design lore as a DIY pioneer. The exhibition also honors women whose work years were overlooked, including Aino Marsio, wife of Alvar Aalto, and Charles’ partner Ray Eames, whose contributions were long obscured by wider narratives.
From suffragettes to 80s feminists
The same inquiry drives the Design Hub Barcelona study, which tracks a feminist archaeology across the 60s, 70s and 80s. This period saw a surge of demand for change and a shift in women’s rights that influenced how design was imagined and produced. Catalan commissioners Teresa Bastardes, Isabel Cendoya and Isabel Fernández del Moral describe ongoing interviews and film work that uncover designers who vanished from public view. Much of the collection is newly donated, with over sixty percent of the pieces appearing in the show for the first time.
In this arc of history, suffragette banners meet practical design tools. The exhibition also addresses the everyday challenges that women faced, from underacknowledged labor to the practical needs of daily life. The enduring question remains: how would lived experience shape design if the voices of women had been heard more clearly from the start? The answer lies in the stories the show brings to light—stories that reframe design history as a shared human effort rather than a narrow male-centered chronicle.