Women Who Shaped Textile Design: Nine Makers and What They Changed

Textiles were one of the few design fields where women could train, teach and run their own studios through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the list of what they started is long. This post sticks to nine whose work changed methods and ideas, not only looks. For the better-known print names, see famous textile designers.

May Morris (1862-1938). William Morris's daughter took charge of the embroidery department at Morris & Co. in 1885, designed embroideries, and wrote Decorative Needlework (1893). She treated stitchwork as design, not hobby craft. Her designs sit in the world described in William Morris pattern inspiration.

Candace Wheeler (1827-1923). In 1883 Wheeler co-founded the New York firm Associated Artists with Louis Comfort Tiffany and others. It produced woven and embroidered textiles for American interiors and showed that women could run a decorating business at scale.

Phyllis Barron (1890-1964) and Dorothy Larcher (1884-1952). These two British block printers worked as partners from the 1920s into the late 1930s. They printed bold, simple repeats on linen and cotton, with deep colors and discharge methods,. Their work is a lesson in restraint: few motifs, strong ground, one idea per cloth. A palette in their spirit: iron black #2A2623, madder #9A3F3A, indigo #2B3A5B on natural linen #E9E1CC. Our block printing pattern design guide explains the method.

Enid Marx (1902-1998). Marx learned hand printing from Barron, then designed upholstery moquette for London Transport in the 1930s, plus furnishing fabrics in wartime Britain. Moquette must hide wear, so her small, dense repeats are built to survive years of wear and still look intentional.

Gunta Stölzl (1897-1983). Stölzl entered the Bauhaus as a student, rose to lead its weaving workshop and held that post until 1931. Under her the workshop moved from wall hangings to fabrics meant for industry. The fuller story is in Bauhaus weavers and textile artists.

Anni Albers (1899-1994). Albers trained at the Bauhaus, moved to the United States in 1933 and taught at Black Mountain College. Her 1949 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art was a landmark for textiles as a modern art form, and her books On Designing (1959) and On Weaving (1965) are still read by designers. She thought in structure: the grid of warp and weft is the pattern.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943). The Swiss artist taught textile design in Zurich from 1916 and worked in embroidery, beadwork and weaving as well as painting. Her geometric compositions, built from squares, circles and rectangles, show that a pattern can be a painting and a painting a pattern.

Dorothy Liebes (1897-1972). An American weaver known for combining bright color, metallic threads and unexpected fibers in handwoven fabric. She worked with fiber makers and mills, bridging the studio and the factory so that a handwoven look could be reproduced by machine.

Marianne Strengell (1909-1998). Born in Finland, she led the weaving department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and worked with the architect Eero Saarinen on interior fabrics. She taught a generation of American textile designers, and her work shows what it looks like when fabric is designed for a building, not just a room.

• Structure is the pattern. Albers, Stölzl and Taeuber-Arp started from the grid.
• Restraint reads as confidence. Barron and Larcher used few motifs and big gaps.
• Design for the use. Marx's moquette and Strengell's architectural fabrics were designed for wear and light, not for the swatch.

If you want a geometric or woven look without a loom, Browse Styles in Pattern Weaver offers geometric patterns and mid-century patterns to start from, and Describe It lets you write your own prompt. Browse more art patterns for painterly, studio-made looks.