In front of and behind the Mirror Women in Italian Radical Design

The period known as ‘Radical’ mirrored, between the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s, the social changes stimulated by the international counterculture and the debate on design, with a renovated overlapping between art, architecture, industrial design and communication. In Italy, as a consequence of feminism in universities and in professional world, women began sliding their roles: from avant-garde or part of a couple, they become components of groups and firms and they are more and more active in specialized magazine editing or managing position. We can find women in almost all the radical groups as Archizoom, UFO, Superstudio, in temporary association as Global Tools, U e/o R (Utopia e/o Rivoluzione) or in countercultural magazines as Pianeta Fresco, Modo or Domus (Mendini eds.) On the other hand they featured the most obvious witness of the change in the world of the image: the advertisings of the new pieces of furniture represented them as users very far from the house angel of the post-war period or the bourgeois working woman of the economic boom, and the change in home design and communication run together with the women’s one: informal, affordable, multi-use, at least aggressive. The paper aims to investigate which was the real weight of women in the transformations both of the design culture and the communication through a recognition of the fields in which they were really engaged (i.e. they continued to be interested in fashion, personal care and social activities).