SINGAPORE – In 1919, Italian luxury furniture maker Poltrona Frau released a scandalous armchair.

In place of the standard brooding gentleman, the lounging star of its poster image was a woman, smoking – her lit cigarette and louche posture transgressive for an era when women were banned from puffing in public.

“This chair was a bang, a crash, a revolution,” says Italian architect and designer Roberto Palomba, one of two curators of Abito, a new exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore.

Running from Oct 3 to 17, Abito, backed by Italy’s ministry of foreign affairs and international cooperation, chronicles the social ascent of women through a century of Italian fashion and furniture.

The show takes its 71-piece assemblage of chairs and clothes from the corseted 1890s to the androgynous present, showcasing the representative items of each 10- to 20-year period chronologically.

Palomba and his co-curator, architect Ludovica Serafini, have paired said scandalous chair with a box coat from 1922, the latter’s straight lines and unnipped waist a radical break from the asphyxiating corsets of the decade before.

The coat contextualises the armchair, for it was freedom from the bustier “cage” that permitted women to sit comfortably, says Palomba on a call with The Straits Times from Milan. Laced up, they could not loll.

Thus the show draws persuasive parallels between women’s empowerment and design, a field that – unlike art – has obligations to the market and function, and so “reflects the evolution of society”, suggests Palomba.

Singapore is the first stop for the travelling show following its debut at Milan Design Week in April, after which it will travel to Hong Kong and possibly the United States.

The bedrock of the show is the idea that design is communicative of culture. Only, where contemporary art shouts, design whispers, says Palomba. “It’s more difficult sometimes to catch (design’s messaging)....