An S-shaped frame, open and light; a few stabilising rods; two hinges; and a soft cushion suspended freely within it: the S-Chair, named after its shape, was designed by the architect and designer Eileen Gray, who was born in 1878. Gray was one of the first women to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Soon afterwards, she moved to Paris, where she worked as a designer and artist. In the Paris of the 1920s, she lived in a lesbian-queer milieu in which new and changing friendships, working relationships and love affairs were constantly emerging. Together with Evelyn Wyld, Eileen Gray opened a gallery. For it, they chose the masculine-sounding name Jean Désert – perhaps in order to be taken more seriously and paid more fairly, perhaps as part of an androgynous and queer act of self-fashioning. Later, in the south of France, Eileen Gray built the house E-1027 for her life together with the architectural critic Jean Badovici. The name encodes both their initials. In scholarship, Gray’s aesthetic has been described as Sapphic modernism: a modernism that, unlike Le Corbusier’s “machine for living in”, strives for softness and lightness – as the S-Chair shows. In the undulating cushion and the S-curves of this folding chair, we sense moments of shelter, enclosure and the sea. Gray described her architecture as a space for the woman who needs “a room of one’s own” – echoing the title of the famous feminist essay by the queer writer Virginia Woolf. Above Gray’s daybed in the living area were the words “Invitation to the voyage”, after Baudelaire’s poem of the same name, which promises a lesbian idyll as the destination of a journey. With these two literary quotations, Gray marks the important role played by queer literary utopias in her vision of modernity. Gray’s partner at the time used the house to build his professional reputation in Le Corbusier’s circle. At times, E-1027 was even attributed to her male colleague Le Corbusier. Although he valued Gray’s work, he also seems to have felt threatened by her alternative to his own vision of modernism. Eventually, he painted murals on the walls of Gray’s architecture – an act she described as destructive and abusive towards her art. In 1932, not far from E-1027, she began building a house of her own, intended for her private life. For its terrace, she designed the famous folding S-Chair. With its minimalist, geometric and yet sinuous, light-filled form, the S-Chair exemplifies Gray’s feminine and queer influence on modernism: beauty in spite of, and in defiance of, sexist appropriation and exploitation.