With International Women's Day just around the corner, we have been looking into some of the most inspirational female designers of all time. We hope to motivate you too, and awaken your creative potential.
RAY EAMES
Ray famously worked alongside her husband, Charles Eames, and most of their work came from their collective creativeness. Charles famously said, 'Anything I can do, Ray can do better'. She studied art and painting with Hans Hofmann, before moving to the Cranbrook Academy. There, she assisted Charles and Eero Saarinen in molded plywood designs, which Charles and Ray continued together, producing molded plywood splints and strecthers in World War II.
While the Eames Lounge Chair is the most famous, our favourite is the LCW. This chair pushes the limits of molded plywood to create a beautiful, stylish and functional chair. This chair was designed towards the end of the war, as the office began to turn their attention back to furniture, with the finished design released in 1945.
EILEEN GRAY
Eileen attended the Slade School of Fine Art, studying painting. When asked to decorate an apartment, she turned to furniture design and designed most of the furniture for the interior decoration. This in turn led to an interest in architecture, and she built her first home E.1027 in 1929. Throughout her life, she lived in Ireland, London and Paris, working in different trades, such as lacquer.
Eileen’s Bibendum chair is one of her first and most famous pieces of work. She chose the name from the Michelin character that was used to advertise tyres, due to the shape of the chair. The overall intention for this apartment decoration was to create a modern, innovative and uncluttered design, achieved through her furniture designs.
NANNA DITZEL
Nanna is a Danish furniture designer who won both the Milan Triennale and the Lunning Prize. She studied at the Danish School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and her works included furniture, jewellery and textiles. As her career progressed, she started experimenting with materials such as foam, plastic and fibreglass.
Her first successful piece of furniture was a hanging wicker egg chair in 1957, designed alongside her husband, Jorgen). Other wicker designs include the Rana chair (a three legged chair, which integrates the shell on a frame in one piece) and the Chill Lounge chair (which she designed shortly after her husband’s death).
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