SEXXXY BLUE , LES LUNETTES QU’ON DéSHABILLE
New collection DIOR, 2 November 2015
il am Rhein is an unassuming German city in the shadow of Tüllinger Mountain. On the side of an anonymous grey tower block in the centre of town, Stadt der Stühle – city of chairs – is written in a neat sans serif font many metres high. There is a street in Weil am Rhein called charles-Eames-Straße. Turn left, then left again down Müllheimer Straße due south, and with equal swif-tness, you will cross the invisible line that takes you out of the EU,
If you turn left out of it onto Römerstraße and drive for a few minutes, you’ll cross the Rhine, and with it, the border into France. Talmost immediately finding yourself in the suburbs of the Swiss city of Basel. Berlin, in contrast, lies a mighty 858 km northeast. charles-Eames-Straße is the home of Vitra campus, its coordinates a metaphor for the company’s unconventional genius; the genius of bringing elements together.
If Vitra has a face, it is that of Rolf Fehlbaum; a pale, attentive man usually found with an open necked white shirt, trademark black framed glasses matching his neatly tailored jacket. Do not be fooled by the clean lines; minimalism does not feature here. Kaleidoscopic complexity is the hallmark of the Vitra sto-ry. Rolf was born in 1941, the eldest son of Erika and Willi Fehlbaum. Another of their other offspring was Vitra, created to produce chairs by Ray and charles Eames, and George Nelson in 1957, when Rolf was 16. The company cut its teeth on moulded plywood, hand stitched leather, and hefty price tags, but quickly displayed its radical design credentials and segued into mass produced polyester.
The fluid scarlet ‘S’ of the Pantonstolen (1965) was the world’s first plastic stacking chair. While its DNA was scooped from ideas floating in the design ether since before the war, Danish designer and namesake Verner Panton formulated its shape, with Erika and Willi playing midwife. North American design giant Herman Miller marketed the result, kicking off a partnership that endured for decades.
