Pop design

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Pop design is the design of the 1960s that took its inspiration from Pop Art and mass culture: advertising, comics, cinema, rock music, supermarket products. After decades of the Modern Movement, with its sober, durable, "forever" objects, a generation of young designers discovered the pleasure of objects that were colourful, cheap, fun and even disposable, designed for a young public and an increasingly affluent society.

Origins: London and Pop Art

The ideas of Pop were born in London in the 1950s, at the meetings of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi and critics such as Reyner Banham discussed advertising, science fiction and American products. In 1956 Richard Hamilton's collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, a home full of appliances, bodybuilders and brand names, became the manifesto of the new taste. The following year Hamilton described pop art with a list of words that applies to design too: popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy.

Plastic and new materials

The signature material of Pop design was plastic: light, washable, coloured throughout, suited to industrial production. The Panton Chair by the Dane Verner Panton, an S-shaped cantilever chair moulded in a single piece, is considered the first chair moulded in plastic as one element. In 1963 the Finn Eero Aarnio designed the Ball Chair, a fibreglass sphere you sit in as if in a space capsule. Panton brought the same spirit to interiors, with psychedelic environments in which walls, seating and lights merged, such as those for the Spiegel publishing house in Hamburg (1969).

Italian Pop

In Italy Pop produced some of the century's most famous seating. In 1967 Jonathan De Pas, Donato D'Urbino, Paolo Lomazzi and Carla Scolari designed the inflatable Blow armchair in transparent PVC for Zanotta. In 1968 Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro invented the Sacco, also for Zanotta: a large bag filled with polystyrene beads that takes the shape of the body, the first beanbag. In 1970 De Pas, D'Urbino and Lomazzi created Joe for Poltronova, an armchair shaped like a giant baseball glove, dedicated to the champion Joe DiMaggio and reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures.

From celebration to critique

At the end of the decade the enthusiasm for consumption gave way to criticism. Many young Italian designers used the language of pop to mock consumer society rather than celebrate it: this was the birth of Radical design. The 1973 oil crisis, which drove up the price of plastic, closed the season of optimism. But Pop had changed design for ever: it showed that an object could be ironic, ephemeral and joyful, paving the way for Postmodernism. Many of its pieces, from the Panton Chair to the Sacco, are still in production.