WOMAN MADE: Great Women Designers, by Jane Hall, Phaidon

"Thoroughly international in scope, [Woman Made] is a compendium of disarming surprises." - Wall Street Journal

The most comprehensive, fully illustrated book on women designers ever published - a celebration of more than 200 women product designers from the early twentieth century to the present day

Since the early 20th century, women have been a steady force within the design world. However, their efforts by and large have gone overlooked, relegated to the shadows of those of their male counterparts. In Woman Made: Great Women Designers, British architect and author Jane Hall compiles outstanding works that have greatly impacted the trajectory of design, giving female creatives the attention they deserve. This glorious visual celebration of the most incredible and impactful design ever produced by women designers flips the script on what is historically considered a man's world. Featuring more than 200 designers from more than 50 countries, including icons and trailblazers past and present such as Ray Eames, Eileen Gray, Florence Knoll, Ilse Crawford, Faye Toogood, Nathalie du Pasquier, it records and illuminates the fascinating and overlooked history of women preeminent in the field. With each designer represented by a key product and short text, this fascinating A-Z survey shines a vital spotlight on the most extraordinary objects made by women designers but, more importantly, offers a compelling primer on the best in the field of design demonstrating that design is not - and never has been - a man's world.

Woman Made: Great Women Designers by Jane Hall, Phaidon 2021

Jay Sae Jung Oh, Savage Sofa_Black Edition

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A New Book Brings to Light the Profound Impact of Women Designers

Text by Mandi Keighran

It’s been right in front of us all along, but architect Jane Hall’s latest book makes it abundantly clear: Design as we know it would be nothing without a woman.

Since the early 20th century, women have been a steady force within the design world. However, their efforts by and large have gone overlooked, relegated to the shadows of those of their male counterparts. In Woman Made: Great Women Designers, British architect and author Jane Hall compiles outstanding works that have greatly impacted the trajectory of design, giving female creatives the attention they deserve. "The patriarchal nature of architecture, among many reasons, is why a large number of women leave the profession in pursuit of other focuses, which often lead many into other design disciplines," argues Hall. "An incredibly high number of architects featured in Woman Made started out in architecture, so it felt like an apt way to make visible even more women who have done, and are continuing to, make important work that often goes unseen across all fields of design." The book spans designers from the early 20th century to present day, highlighting the experiences of women responsible for profound innovations. Take the modular apartments designed by Charlotte Perriand in the late 1920s, for example, which were a response to changing attitudes to family life. On a more conceptual level, Hall offers Jane Dillon’s whimsical furniture, an attempt to reclaim the home from the patriarchal gaze.

Jay Sae Jung Oh: Savage Sofa

With sweeping black folds molded into a buoyant, amorphous shape, the Savage sofa creates an unusual seat form that seems at once inviting while also entirely improbable for its material strangeness. This tension encapsulates Jay Sae Jung Oh’s design philosophy of combining the aesthetic priority of art and images with the tactility of design. The first iteration of the Savage Sofa, which forms part of a series, was made while Oh was studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where she noticed dumpsters often overflowing with discarded prototypes for items ranging from patio furniture to musical instruments. She collected these objects and combined them with other refuse into an assemblage of waste that she then wrapped with natural jute cord.