Furniture, Feminism and the Feminine: Women Designers in Post-war Italy, 1945 to 1970
Royal College of Art / Victoria and Albert Museum, London E-mail: catharine.rossi{at}network.rca.ac.uk
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Abstract |
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Women furniture designers played a key role in Italian post-war design, and yet their presence has been overlooked and their contribution under-acknowledged. This article is part of continuing research into the existence, experience and representation of women designers and architects in post-war Italy. It uses a feminist approach to focus on those women who engaged predominantly with furniture design in Milan from 1945 to the early 1970s. Furniture design was a marginal option for women in post-war Italy; its links with architecture and the wider sociocultural context are used to understand their minority status. Women designers employed strategies to overcome this gender marginality and these influenced both their experiences within the profession and the recognition they have received. From the trend of male–female partnership to those who either embraced or rejected female solidarity, these women designers demonstrate multiple and contradictory relationships with their own sex, the idea of the feminine and feminism. The use of female imagery by male designers in the 1960s and 1970s suggests that both the feminine and feminism were problematic as forms of expression for women furniture designers, pointing to the embryonic status of the women's movement at this time and its marginal impact on the profession.