The Plia chair, the lamp Dollaro $ and the Moon Boots. How were these objects born? Their designers tell us about it

About fifty years ago I designed a folding chair that was named Plia. I made this design on my own, without being commissioned to do so. Actually, once the prototype was ready, I had a hard time convincing the com- pany for which I worked to manufacture it.

It’s a lightweight chair, which is not meant to be like a fixed chair around a table; it’s a chair that you go get from some other room when you need it for your guests. I used very thin tubes because, on first impact, it was also supposed to be visually light and in no way intrusive. And not just that: I understood that I needed to make a seat and a back that were transparent to make it look even lighter. Furthermore, it wasn’t supposed to be a problem if it needed to be placed next to other furniture already there in the house, so I went searching for see- through plastic. The problem was that that kind of plastic didn’t exist. I was lucky because at Bayer in Germany, which I had gone to visit, at that very same time they were working on a transparent material that could be used to make a chair.

At first, they’d studied it so that it could be used to make sunglasses, but then they perfected it, reinforcing it. So I was very happy to have a transparent material for the first time, and I used it for this chair!

Plia was unveiled at the Furniture Trade Fair in Milan. As a prototype it was highly successful because it was unquestionably “new.” The chair was very successful because its first customers were fashion designers: Mila Schön, for example, saw the chairs and when she told us the number of them she needed to buy she spoke of 2/3000 of them! In those days, we never even considered such high numbers! Later, it was seen in fashion magazines and for Castelli, which produced it, it was a very important thing because the magazines generated “free” advertising: the ladies would go to the Castelli store holding the magazine itself to ask for that specific chair. It was a great success throughout Europe. But when Castelli asked me to take it to the United States, where they were searching for a distributor, they ran up against an unpleasant surprise in the marketing, which would not accept the fact that it was see-through. The problem was that their clients weren’t used to seeing that type of chair, which didn’t exist... so they rejected it! From that day forwards I have always felt that marketing is the enemy of designers, at least it is so for me. Only many years later did the chair begin to spread in the United States and rather successfully so, much more than what we could have imagined.

I’m very fond of telling an anecdote that hap- pened about thirty years ago. The Plia wasn’t all that comfortable for the person who used it, it was meant to be used for one, two hours at most: I had put everything into the aes- thetics! In London a company that displayed it wanted to try a fun test: it took nine chairs, in addition to mine, and invited ten people, who were blindfolded, to try them, offering their opinion on how comfortable each of them was. In terms of comfort Plia was in fourth or fifth place. When they took the blindfolds off, they invited the same people to express their preference in terms of aes- thetics, and Plia was number one! I really liked this: every object is generally chosen for its aesthetic impact. First you consider appearance, then whether or not it’s com- fortable. In the end, people choose with their eyes, not with their... bottoms. Even now I find this aspect something that needs to be taken into account: this is the principle my work is based on whenever I design a chair.