Portraits | Portraits: Women Designers

Barbara Brown

Textiles Designer (1932-) Born in 1932, Barbara Brown studied at Canterbury College of Art and then the RCA. Before leaving the RCA, Brown had sold her first fabric to Heal’s and subsequently designed for them for the next two decades. Like Lucienne Day, she was working for Heal’s ‘without contract on an exclusive basis’, (Harris,…

Audrey Levy

Textile designer (1928-) Audrey Levy was born in Nottingham in 1928 and after studying textiles at her local art college, completed her studies at the RCA. On graduation, Levy worked in a number of professional studios. In 1957, she designed, ‘Impasto’, a screenpainted wallpaper for The Wall Paper Manufacturers Ltd., (WPM) which received the Council of…

Natasha Kroll

Display and Production Designer (1912-2004) Natasha Kroll studied display design at the Reimann School in Berlin, and joined its teaching staff when the school moved to London in 1936. In 1942 Kroll was appointed display manager at Simpson (Piccadilly) Ltd. where her display philosophy, rooted in European modernism, complemented the new premises designed by Joseph Emberton….

Commentary

Setting/Context/Environment In many of the portraits included in this display, we can learn as much about the professional identity of the designer from the background as from the foreground of the picture. We can usually tell that they are ‘professional’ rather than ‘personal’ portraits, because the women are pictured ‘at work’ or with some of…

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