Panton's chair icon becomes colourful duo

When Verner Panton came into contact with Vitra in 1963, he had been looking for the right furniture manufacturer for years. He wanted to create a comfortable chair in plastic and in one piece. In 1967, the Panton Chair was presented. The curved shape looked more like an undulating wave frozen in mid-motion than a chair, but Verner Panton was also one of the most innovative designers of the decade.

On 2 June this year, Vitra is releasing the Panton Chair Duo in a limited edition of 999 chairs globally. In a tribute to Verner Panton's iconic way of always enhancing design with colour, the now legendary model is updated with two contrasting colours per chair - one on the front and one on the back.

Verner Panton understood how colours could affect our mood and studied their psychological significance to use it in his designs. Convinced that different colours should always be presented and appreciated together, never separately, he combined several colours:

When creating an environment, colour planning is crucial. It is not enough to say that red is red and blue is blue. I usually work with parallel colours whose tones follow each other on the colour spectrum. This way I can control the colour temperature in a room and create a certain mood.

A landscape of colour

In a room bursting with colour combinations, now known as the Panton Fantasy Landscape, Verner Panton demonstrated what he meant. The room was part of his Visiona 2 exhibition at the 1970 Cologne Furniture Fair. In a cave-like tunnel of organic forms, the walls and floor were covered in tones of purple and blue with a luminous centre of red, orange and yellow. This has come to be known as the culmination of Panton's creative vision.

It is also where Vitra drew inspiration for the colour combinations of the Panton Chair Duo. Purple is paired with pink magenta, pine green with blue. On each chair and in five different combinations, two colours come together, which also means that the chair changes its appearance depending on which way you look.

Panton broke all conventions

Experimenting with bright colours and geometric shapes, Verner Panton was fascinated by the design possibilities offered by plastic. As one of the most influential designers of the 1960s and 1970s, he was known for proposing new ways of looking at interior design. In 1958, he exhibited a series of furniture hanging from the ceiling at the Applied Art Show and his designs have developed new ideas about the structure of chairs. With his spectacular design concepts, he went against all conventions of how we should live and behave in an interior landscape and left a design legacy in colour. He himself always dressed in blue.