Panton Chair

PurplePrice Mag · October 29, 2026 · 2 min read

The Panton Chair is an S-shaped chair: seat, back and base form one continuous curve, with no legs. It was designed by the Dane Verner Panton and is considered the first moulded plastic chair made in a single piece. Today it is one of the masterpieces of Danish design and was included in the Danish Culture Canon in 2006.

A ten-year dream

The idea of a stackable plastic chair had been around since before the war, but Panton pursued it from the early 1950s: a cantilevered, stackable chair all in one piece. It is said that he was inspired by a neat stack of plastic buckets. In 1956 he designed the S Chair, which anticipated its shape, and in 1960 he made a first plaster model. For years no manufacturer was interested: the material of the moment was wood.

Meeting Vitra

In the mid-1960s Panton met Willi Fehlbaum of Vitra, who on the contrary was fascinated by the drawings. Together they made a first chair in fibreglass-reinforced polyester: for the first time a whole chair was a single piece, without legs. It was heavy, though, and needed a lot of hand finishing, so the design was adapted to industrial production using thermoplastics. Unveiled in 1967 in the Danish magazine Mobilia, it caused a sensation; from 1968 Vitra produced it in series, in several colours.

The materials change, the shape stays

In 1979 production stopped, because the polystyrene used did not age well. In 1983 it returned as the Panton Chair Classic, in polyurethane structural foam, and in 1999 Vitra launched the polypropylene version, cheaper and more colourful. With its curves it became a symbol of Pop and Space Age aesthetics, even appearing on the cover of British Vogue in 1995. It is in the collections of MoMA and London's Design Museum.