One for furs and coats, another for women’s clothing, another for men’s clothing, and a fourth for jewelry, accessories, and toiletries. One of the longest-lasting department stores in England is Bennetts, which opened in Derby in 1734 as a store specializing in ironware and now offers a wide range of home décor and housewares.

You’d have to ask the salesgirl, ‘Hey, do you have any other colors?,’ and she would search the stockroom for you.

Before this change, department stores would have everything behind the glass case, with just one sample out.

a pastel color scheme

Victorian department stores

And Loewy’s plan wasn’t just about how shoppers experienced the space, but how the stores could more efficiently sell their merchandise.”

To most people, they were aspirational spaces celebrating what you couldn’t have, unless you were extremely wealthy.

Raymond Loewy

Alessandra Wood

They would build their dream homes in the suburbs and fill them with shiny new appliances and furnishings made of cutting-edge materials, like acrylic and fiberglass, developed for the war. There, housewives would throw away their Rosie the Riveter coveralls and reclaim their “femininity” with new dresses, fashion accessories, and beauty products.

It seems that the 2008 recession and dominance of the Internet—where you can buy anything and everything with a few clicks—have taken their toll on brick-and-mortar behemoths like JCPenney, Sears, and even Macy’s. As the Computer Age thrusts us into the future, would-be mall rats are spending all their time on Facebook, and the breath-taking range of products, once so meticulously displayed for our delight, is being crammed into our PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

About 20 percent of the 2,000 largest U.S. malls were failing in 2008, and by 2012, only 1,513 remained in operation.

Raymond Loewy had already made a name for himself as a futurist design visionary.

His store offered customers special services like free delivery and waiting rooms.

(To small-time shopkeepers, these new department stores threatened their livelihood the way Amazon upsets brick-and-mortar retail today.)

One of the longest-lasting department stores in England is Bennetts, which opened in Derby in 1734 as a store specializing in ironware and now offers a wide range of home décor and housewares.

You’d have to ask the salesgirl, ‘Hey, do you have any other colors?,’ and she would search the stockroom for you.

Before this change, department stores would have everything behind the glass case, with just one sample out.

a pastel color scheme

Victorian department stores

And Loewy’s plan wasn’t just about how shoppers experienced the space, but how the stores could more efficiently sell their merchandise.”

“To most people, they were aspirational spaces celebrating what you couldn’t have, unless you were extremely wealthy.

Raymond Loewy

Alessandra Wood

They would build their dream homes in the suburbs and fill them with shiny new appliances and furnishings made of cutting-edge materials, like acrylic and fiberglass, developed for the war. There, housewives would throw away their Rosie the Riveter coveralls and reclaim their “femininity” with new dresses, fashion accessories, and beauty products.

It seems that the 2008 recession and dominance of the Internet—where you can buy anything and everything with a few clicks—have taken their toll on brick-and-mortar behemoths like JCPenney, Sears, and even Macy’s. As the Computer Age thrusts us into the future, would-be mall rats are spending all their time on Facebook, and the breath-taking range of products, once so meticulously displayed for our delight, is being crammed into our PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

About 20 percent of the 2,000 largest U.S. malls were failing in 2008, and by 2012, only 1,513 remained in operation.

Margaret Calvert

So talking about issues for women in design is not only important for students, but the educators that advise them.

“I’d like to see females become more confident in publishing their process, ideas, and experiences. I see this as a continuity of tradition that we have inherited from the artists and designers who fought hard for us to sit at the table.

Brockett Horne

Everyone needs to learn about them and their work, especially young designers. If not, then there’s just this big gap that doesn’t tell the entire story of graphic design.”

“Not enough women designers are given the recognition that they deserve,” says graphic designer Antonio Carusone.

Teal Triggs and Sian Cook, of the Women’s Design + Research Unit in the UK, explain, “For far too long, history has either marginalised or excluded many women from being entered into the design history books and as a result, the design canon.

Hitchcock adds, “Why does design history still teach about male designers 80% more than women designers? Why do we have 80 % women in the student body (in our [RISD] department) and 80% men in the faculty?”

Lucinda Hitchcock is a professor

Design history has long overlooked women in our narrative, despite continuously having a large group of women active in the field of graphic design over the past century.

but perhaps we still accept some mores of old, underlying currents that flow through our design culture, much like that lecture in 2011.

Forty or fifty years ago, the workforce was overwhelmingly a man’s world. In the design field, many women may have been assistants or “office girls” and so few held the top titles, such as art director or creative director. In a basic sense, women’s careers have rarely followed the same path of men’s, since there has historically been immense pressure placed on women to be solely homemakers and nurture families (see: Beyond The Glass Ceiling: an open discussion, Astrid Stavro, Elephant #6) with more sinister pressures of socially-accepted sexism and segregation discouraging, or even disqualifying, the career ambitions of capable women.

In the UK it is lower, although the Design Council research found that 70% of design students in the UK are women, but 60% of the industry is male

In the history of graphic design, my classmates and I were learning about just twenty-two women. That was only 6% of the overall canon. Surely this was a mistake.

Women of Graphic Design, talks through some of the issues facing women in the past, and regrettably, in our industry today.