It was the late ‘50s when Danish designer Verner Panton produced plans for a chair moulded from a single piece of plastic, which was, at the time, a new material revolutionizing design. But it was only in 1967, roughly a decade later, that he and Swiss furniture maker Vitra eventually released the curvaceous seat. What caused the hold-up? Panton was trying to do something nobody had done before.

The designer spoke with around 15 to 20 producers before approaching Vitra in ‘63, all of whom rejected the project. Vitra was the first to say yes, and after four years and ten prototypes the “Panton Chair,” the first mass-produced moulded plastic chair, was finally ready. Their persistence paid off, and the resulting seat became a trailblazing piece of midcentury modern design that’s still evolving today. 

This year would’ve been Panton's 100th birthday, and Vitra is hosting a large exhibition of his space-age furniture. It’s also releasing his snaking plastic seat in new colors voted for by the public, which sounds innocuous until you consider how vital color was to Panton’s work.

The guy literally wrote the book on color. 

His 1997 publication Notes on Color delved into his lifelong obsession with striking hues, including fantastic lines such as, "Colors are a subjective, physical perception — they really don’t exist at all. Yellow is yellow only in our thoughts. It is only the function of our eyes that creates colors. Everything in our surroundings has a color — only water (distilled) and schnapps are colorless!" and “one sits more comfortably on a color that one likes.”

That latter quote is especially pertinent in this context.

Vitra didn’t let random civilians pick colors at random, but rather offered a selection of seven shades from Panton’s interior architecture projects and let voters choose four winners.

And the winning shades, “Bold Orange,” “Flash Red,” “Electric Blue,” and “Bright Turquoise,” are each used on a limited-edition Panton Chair, releasing June 17 in a limited run of 2,000 units. 

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