Paola De Martin
From fashion label owner to cultural scientist and social justice activist
“The Federal Design Commission has chosen Paola De Martin because she has redefined the design educator as a multifaceted and influential figure. Moreover, she makes an active and innovative contribution to many national and international design history platforms. Her work spans multiple disciplines and touches on themes that are as forward-looking as they are essential to the present.”
Federal Design Commission
With a background as a textile designer, historian and lecturer, Paola De Martin has spent years researching classism and other forms of discrimination in our culture. Her work on norms, rules and structures has blazed a trail in design research. Even in her dissertation, entitled “Give us a break!”, she dealt with feelings of belonging and exclusion on the Zurich design scene that was her workplace during the 1990s as a textile student and later co-founder of the fashion label Beige. Taking her own experiences as the child of a migrant worker family with poor access to the education system as her starting point, she developed a critical view of the established structures that automatically exclude underprivileged children from the field, writing them off in favour of others.
As a lecturer at design schools and postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, she teaches students to reflect on such exclusion and encourages them to explore their own background and privileges from an intersectional perspective.
Paola De Martin was born in 1965 and is a citizen of Zurich and Belluno (Italy). She lives and works in Zurich.
