If you visited one of the Bauhaus dormitories in Dessau in the late 1920s, you would have noticed a blanket that was simple, beautiful, and functional, in keeping with the principles of the Bauhaus movement. These Prellerhaus blankets, named for one of the dormitories in the Bauhaus Dessau campus, featured a graphic pattern of stripes in various shades of brown that would give a bedroom a modern, orderly look. They were originally crafted out of rayon, a plastic-based fiber that was considered cutting edge at the time because it was more durable than organic fibers like wool or cotton.
According to Dezeen, the team re-created the original design by carefully studying archival drawings, photographs, swatches, and a copy of the blanket produced for a 1996 exhibition. Given that plastic-based fibers are now considered less sustainable, Wallace Sewell chose to make these blankets out of wool, and created two new colorways in addition to the brown one. The fabrics are then manufactured in factories in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the U.K. The new blankets will be featured on dormitory beds when the Bauhaus Dessau building reopens in September. (For now, they will not be available to the public to purchase.)
Elizabeth Otto, the author of a new book called Bauhaus Women and an art history professor at the University of Buffalo, says that Stölzl experienced a gender pay gap that is now a common topic of conversation, but was a new idea at the time.
“Muche continued to get paid even though Stölzl was doing the work of the master,” Otto says. “Then, when the school refused to pay her as much as Muche, she had to threaten to quit before they would compensate her fairly.”
Otto, along with many Bauhaus scholars, believes that the Bauhaus movement was actually ahead of its time when it came to gender equality. Walter Gropius, the architect who founded the Bauhaus in 1919, invited women to join the school, which gave them the opportunity to learn new crafts. But Otto says that for all of this idealism, the men and women within the Bauhaus movement found themselves wrestling with gender norms of the the time. Women were subtly–and at times, explicitly–encouraged into workshops associated with the inside of the home, like textiles and interior design, rather than architecture, painting, and advertising. But at every turn, women like Stölzl fought against these stereotypical ideas about the role of men and women in society.
Stölzl’s blankets, brought to life again thanks to Wallace Sewell, serve as a reminder of the struggle for gender equality within the Bauhaus movement, and also, perhaps, how little things have changed since that time. After all, a century after the Bauhaus’s founding, women still struggle to be promoted into leadership positions and continue to fight to receive the same wages as their male counterparts.