Woman Made: Great Women Designers

Most design histories give a handful of famous names a chapter each and everyone else a footnote. Woman Made refuses to rank anybody: every designer in it gets exactly one page, one object, and the same amount of room.

Phaidon's Woman Made is Jane Hall's A to Z survey of more than 200 women product designers working across 50-plus countries, each represented by a single defining object and a short text. Ray Eames, Eileen Gray and Florence Knoll sit in the same alphabet as Nathalie du Pasquier, Ilse Crawford and Faye Toogood, judged on one piece of work rather than a career-spanning essay. Nothing else competes for the spread. Phaidon calls it the most comprehensive fully illustrated book on women designers published to date, and the scale is the argument: put enough work side by side and the idea that design was ever a man's field falls apart without anyone needing to say so.

Hall is an architect and a founding member of Assemble, the Turner Prize-winning collective based in London, and the inaugural recipient of the British Council's Lina Bo Bardi Fellowship. She built the same one-designer-one-spread structure for her earlier Phaidon book, Breaking Ground, a survey of women architects; Woman Made turns that lens on product design instead. The Wall Street Journal found the result "thoroughly international in scope" and "a compendium of disarming surprises", which is a fair description of what happens when an alphabet, rather than a reputation, decides the running order.