From Textile to Space: The Creative Continuum of Women Designers
Anita Puig Gomez
In recent years, there have been a number of successful exhibitions on women in art and design. Sonia Delaunay (2023-2024), Sophie Taeuber-Arp (2022), Anni Albers (2019) are some of these examples. The impossibility of categorising their work as strictly design, applied or fine art reveals the enormous plasticity of their spatial and creative propositions. However, there remains a significant gap in the study of women’s work, particularly the reluctance to analyze it through the lens of spatial practice, as well as the overlooked integration of tools and knowledge transfer from other crafts in shaping women’s contributions to modern design. The presentation looks at the examples of modern female architects who designed costumes, as clothing was understood as a separate world, without being catalogued as part of the overall design experience of these women. The process of tracing and reconstructing these garments demonstrated the interconnectedness of both disciplines within the same creative process, forming a unified language. Their reconstruction revealed a cohesive design narrative displaying consistency with the architectural creations of these female authors. This study highlighted the importance of preserving the clothing created by modern women architects as an integral part of their professional work, and demonstrated the need to expand our narrow separation between disciplines in order to understand the virtuous intersections that women were able to exploit during the twentieth century, but also to expand what we legitimize as part of their work or understand as objects worthy of preservation.
