Alexander Girard

Alexander Girard; Born in 1907 in New York City, he was one of the leading figures of postwar American design, along with his close friends and colleagues George Nelson and Charles & Ray Eames. The main focus of his wide-ranging work was textile design. The designer has created numerous fabrics for the Herman Miller Company, favoring abstract shapes and geometric patterns in a wide variety of color compositions. Many of his upholstery fabrics remain as timely and vital as ever and are still produced and used by Vitra today. After studying architecture, he made a name for himself over his long career in the fields of furniture, exhibition, interior and graphic design. Furthermore, he was one of the foremost collectors of folk art in the world. Multifaceted, extremely creative, he was recently celebrated in the exhibition “Alexander Girard. A Designer's Universe” at the Vitra Design Museum. After the designer's death in 1993, his heirs donated the Girard archive (including hundreds of drawings, prototypes and samples) to the Vitra Design Museum. In 2016/17, the museum staged the exhibition “Alexander Girard: A Designer's Universe”.