Charlotte Perriand was just twenty-four years old when she walked into Le Corbusier’s studio on the Rue de Sèvres in Paris and applied to be a furniture designer. The great Swiss-French architect’s reply was curt: “We don’t embroider cushions here.” A few months later, at the annual Salon D’Automne, he found himself at Le Bar sous le toît, a bold rooftop bar that Perriand had made from steel, aluminium and glass. He marvelled at the construction, and he hired her.

A new exhibition at The Design Museum in London sheds light on Perriand’s pioneering creative process and the key part she played in the history of design. Born in 1903 to a tailor and an haute-couture seamstress, she grew up in a creative household and went on to train at the Ecole de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in the early 1920s. Indifferent to the craft-based approach and Beaux-Arts style advocated by the school, she looked to bicycles and motor cars for inspiration for her machine-age designs. By the time she joined Le Corbusier, she had already established a reputation for herself.

Before Perriand came knocking, Le Corbusier had made do kitting out his architectural projects with ready-made furniture. During the decade she spent with him, Perriand developed avant-garde pieces for several of his exhibition sets and buildings; starting in 1928 with three chairs with chromium-plated, tubular steel bases: the B301 sling-back chair for conversation, the cube-shaped LC2 Grand Confort armchair for relaxation, and the elegant B306 chaise longue recliner for a moment’s shut-eye. She kept in mind his belief that furniture should cater to human wants and needs, and the economic constraints of the early 1930s prompted her to take this humanist ethos one step further, considering the costs and space constraints of the middle and working classes.

In 1937, Perriand left Le Corbusier to carve out her own career. She collaborated with the cubist artist Fernand Léger on a stand at the 1937 Paris Exposition, and with the furniture designer Jean Prouvé on prefabricated aluminium buildings. In 1940, she was invited to travel to Japan as an advisor on industrial design to the Ministry for Trade and Industry, but on her return to France she found herself trapped in Vietnam. When at last she arrived home after the war, she found that her experiences abroad had an encouraging effect on her work – from that point on, she incorporated the functional elements of Japanese interiors and the natural materials of Indochinese design into her colourful creations.

Perriand spent seven decades at the forefront of furniture, architecture and photography, all of which feature in The Design Museum’s exhibition. There are scrapbooks, prototypes, photos, furniture and precise recreations of her most famous interiors, as well as works by Le Corbusier, Léger and Picasso. She not only changed design, but sparked social change in doing so. And although none of her pieces made it to the mass market, she unquestionably succeeded in shaping the 20th century and pushing the boundaries of what design could be.

Charlotte Perriand: The Modern Life is at The Design Museum in London until 5 September