We’re all feeling a bit wan and in need of a lie down after months of WFH and confusing Covid restrictions, so it’s great news that the designer of the modern chaise longue, Charlotte Perriand, is the subject of a major new exhibition at the Design Museum.
The French architect and designer was one of the most influential furniture designers of the early modern movement. Many of her pieces have become 20th-century classics, such as the cube-shaped Grand Confort armchair and the Chaise Longue Basculante, perfect for sprawling and contemplating the state of the world.
But during a career that began in the 1920s and spanned more than half a century, her work was often overshadowed by the male peers with whom she collaborated, such as Le Corbusier and Jean Prouvé.
She was famously initially refused a job at Le Corbusier’s studio, receiving the retort “we don’t embroider cushions here”, before he later saw the genius of her work and gave her a job.
Featuring large-scale reconstructions of some of her most celebrated interiors, as well as original furniture, her photography and personal notebooks, the exhibition will shed new light on Perriand’s creative process and her place in design history.
Charlotte Perriand: The Modern Life focuses on key creations including her Nuage modular bookshelves, designed for university accommodation in France but now a collector’s item.
Set to open in March next year, it has been curated in collaboration with the Perriand family and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which staged a retrospective of Perriand’s work last year. The show will fall on the 25th anniversary of Perriand’s last significant presentation in London, held at the Design Museum in 1996. She died three years later in 1999 aged 96.
It was announced as part of a new season of exhibitions at the Design Museum. Trainer-obsessives will be on the starting blocks for the delayed Sneakers Unboxed: Studio To Street, now planned for April and examining the rise of trainers from practical sports shoes to sought-after fashion accessories.
Waste Age next autumn will look at the role of design in how the problem of waste escalated from the mid-twentieth century. It will also reflect on how design can be part of the solution, with what is thrown away transformed into new resources.
Tim Marlow, the museum’s director and chief executive dedicated the programme of work to Sir Terence Conran who died last month.
Charlotte Perriand: The Modern Life. Design Museum, W8, from March 23, 2021, designmuseum.org
