Show One | 03.27.2026
Riley Hayes
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Modern design relies on structures like the Swiss grid—systems that promise clarity, efficiency, and neutrality. They offer the reassurance of alignment, the sense that everything has its place. But grids do more than organize; they decide what belongs. Shaped in part by the legacy of the Bauhaus—a German art school that claimed openness while redirecting many of its women into textile workshops—this visual language carries a quieter history of gendered divide. Within these
limits, women defied singular methods, experimenting and reshaping the mediums imposed upon them.
As the grid began to dominate mid-century media, it evolved alongside equally rigid ideals of femininity. Vogue, a fashion magazine that has played a large role in influencing cultural perceptions of women, became a perfect example. By the 1960s, its pages were tightly structured, and the female body was often boxed in—cropped, contained, pressed against the edges. The figure reflected the logic of the grid itself: refined, controlled, consumable. The grid did not simply organize the page; it subtly reinforced gendered expectations, embedding them
into a visual language whose influence still persists.
By breaking these spreads into modular fragments: cutting and stitching them with quilt fabric collected from women of that era, I imagine what design could have been if their labor had always been recognized. The grid isn’t erased; it’s softened, made open to complexity and imperfection—transformed from something rigid and sterile into something human.