The work of renowned Bauhaus artists Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl returns to production, just in time for the storied school’s centennial.

When German architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919, he saw the pioneering design school as a way to unite the world through art. However, there was a catch: The expansive curriculum was largely reserved for men. “Most of the women who went to study at the Bauhaus found that the only workshops available to them were weaving and ceramics, not necessarily what they aimed to study. But they went on to make the weaving workshop an amazing embodiment of the school’s ethos,” says Catherine Stowell, creative director of the textiles and wallcoverings brand Designtex. With the company’s president, Susan Lyons, she has spent the past few years digging into the legacy of two of the Bauhaus’s most prolific weavers: Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl.

Albers went on to great renown, both for her marriage to fellow Bauhaus alum Josef Albers and for her innovations as a textile designer and printmaker. But the Designtex collection truly began with an exploration of the work of Stölzl, Albers’s mentor, who was instrumental in turning the Bauhaus weaving workshop into one of the school’s most successful (and profitable) endeavors. “There are a lot of women in the Bauhaus that we wanted to celebrate, but we focused on Gunta as the only female master, and then Anni, one of her students, who has a prominent body of work,” says Stowell.