My project provides a new history of Italian textiles from 1870 to 1945. It traces the effects of shifts in textile production on women during industrialization starting in the late nineteenth century, when craft revivals centered on training women for economic self-sufficiency through lacemaking and embroidery, to the interwar period, when new, consolidated design firms and the integration of textiles into avant-garde art obscured the role of women makers. Working with the proliferation of photographs, Futurist decorative objects, craft manuals, government documents, exhibition catalogs, Fascist periodicals, and artists’ letters dealing with women’s textile labor during this period, I show how shifts in such visual and textual presentations constructed ideas of artistic authorship that increasingly privileged male designers over female makers. Finally, I ask what the political consequences were for women in a period when political identity increasingly was bound up with work.