Header: Rufat Mammadov
International Women’s Day is the perfect moment not to celebrate women, as that is something that should be done every day, but to learn more about those whose ideas shape the industries around us. In design, influence often works behind the scenes: through aesthetic direction, creative leadership and the ability to redefine what audiences come to expect. Much like the character of Miranda Priestly in the film “The Devil Wears Prada”, these designers’ taste, judgement and authority affect designers, brands and ultimately the wider market.
The design world is full of women who play their own “Mirandas”. From industrial design to furniture, footwear to architecture, and lighting to interior design, women are responsible for many of the ideas that define contemporary aesthetics and innovation. The result is a design culture that is diverse, experimental and expressive, one in which personality and originality are actively valued.
Without further ado, here are the eighth most influential female designers right now, in no particular order.
Kazuyo Sejima
Kazuyo Sejima is one of the defining architects of contemporary minimalism, though “minimalism” is ultimately too narrow a label for her work. Through her own practice and especially through SANAA, the studio she founded with Ryue Nishizawa, she developed a style defined by lightness and a remarkable spatial clarity. Buildings such as the New Museum, the Rolex Learning Center and the Sydney Modern Project show her unusual ability to make large structures feel open, fluid and welcoming.
Sejima is one of the most influential architects of her generation because she changed how prestige can be expressed. Traditionally, important institutions were designed to look powerful through heaviness or visual spectacle, but Sejima showed that authority can also be conveyed through openness and spatial generosity. Her buildings often appear almost weightless, yet they hold some of the world’s most important cultural programmes. Today, many younger architects are inspired by her work with glass, soft lines and fluid space.
Jeanne Gang
Jeanne Gang is known for combining architectural originality with a deep concern for how buildings serve cities, communities and the environment. As founder of Studio Gang, she first caught attention for projects such as Aqua Tower in Chicago, but she didn’t stop there. Her studio’s portfolio ranges from cultural and educational work to urban planning and public landscapes, including Tom Lee Park and the University of Chicago Center in Paris, among other ongoing projects.
What makes Gang especially influential is that she has managed to reconnect architecture with environmental and social performance. She is a serious designer of cities, ecosystems, materials and institutions all at once. Her emphasis on community, biodiversity, adaptive reuse and mass timber has made her an inspiration for a generation trying to create beautiful architecture that is sustainable at heart.
Elizabeth Diller
Elizabeth Diller is one of the most influential figures in contemporary architecture because she has expanded the scope of the discipline. Her work moves across buildings, public space, exhibition design, and large cultural projects, showing that architecture can shape not only structures but also how institutions function and how the public engages with them. Projects such as the High Line, The Shed, and MoMA’s expansion illustrate her ability to work at the intersection of design, urban life, and cultural programming.
Her influence comes from the fact that she has helped redefine the architect’s role. Rather than limiting architecture to the design of standalone buildings, she has shown that it can organise experiences, reshape cities, and change the relationship between cultural institutions and the people who use them. The MacArthur Fellowship and the Wolf Prize recognise not just her prominence but also the lasting impact of a career that has widened the ambitions of architecture itself.
Patricia Urquiola
Based in Milan, Patricia Urquiola has built a career through collaborations with major design companies, including Cassina, Moroso, Boffi, Flos and Kartell. Her work is known for its inviting shapes, rich materials and confident use of colour, having helped define the look of contemporary high-end interiors.
What distinguishes Urquiola is her ability to combine comfort with experimentation: designs are practical and made to be used, but they also often have distinctive forms that set them apart. Through her work, she has influenced how luxury design brands think about texture, softness and informality, showing that sophisticated design does not have to be austere.
Neri Oxman
Neri Oxman became influential by merging design with science, engineering and biology in a way that few designers had done before. Through her work at the MIT Media Lab, she developed projects that explore how materials, digital manufacturing and biological processes can be used to create new forms of design, such as the Silk Pavilion and Aguahoja.
Through her work, Oxman effectively expanded what design could be about. Instead of treating it mainly as the shaping of objects or surfaces, she treated it as a way to invent new materials, rethink fabrication and connect environmental questions to technological innovation. Many designers now work in fields shaped by ideas such as biomimicry and sustainability, and it was Oxman who helped make those ideas more visible to contemporary design culture.
Kelly Wearstler
Kelly Wearstler has had a major influence on contemporary interior design by making bold, layered, highly expressive rooms that are highly desired in the luxury market. Her hotel and residential projects helped push high-end interiors away from safe neutral tones and forms towards spaces with personality. Be it interiors, furniture or lighting, she has built a recognisable style based on contrast, sculptural forms, rich materials and the mixing of periods and references.
What makes her work important is not simply that it is decorative or luxurious but that it is carefully structured: materials, objects and forms are carefully arranged to create a strong emotional and visual effect. She helped establish the idea that luxury interiors should not be bland or purely tasteful but rather memorable and full of character.
Faye Toogood
Faye Toogood doesn’t fit into normal boxes of “architect” or “interior designer”, rather preferring to be creative in whichever category she can, be it furniture, fashion, interiors or objects. Her pieces often have distinctive forms with rougher textures, and while works such as the Roly-Poly chair made her widely known, it is her legacy that makes her significant: she has created a design language that feels experimental, tactile and deliberately unconventional.
Toogood helped make design less polished, less rigid and less tied to traditional styles. Her work has encouraged younger designers to treat furniture, clothing and objects more freely and to value instinct, materials and irregularity. In a market often dominated by sleek branding and predictable lines, she showed that awkwardness can also be considered sophisticated.
Lindsey Adelman
Lindsey Adelman changed contemporary lighting by seeing it as one of the most important parts of a design rather than a supportive element or a finishing touch. Since founding her studio in New York, she has designed fixtures that combine the structure of industrial design with the creativity of sculpture, with collections such as Branching Bubble and Agnes having gained incredible international support.
Her work has influenced both custom design and the wider luxury market, and it helped push lighting closer to sculpture and collectable design. As a result, lighting is now more often treated as a defining part of an interior’s identity, not merely as functional equipment.
These eight designers show how much contemporary design is shaped by women working across different fields, each with a clear and lasting point of view. International Women’s Day is a good reason to look more closely at their work, but their influence is already present in the spaces, objects and ideas that define design every day.
