TThe Blow chair was designed as a fun, moveable and ephemeral piece of furniture that could be used both inside and outside. Intended to have a short life span, the materials and form of the chair, as well as its flexibility of use, made it an iconic design of the Pop generation.
The Blow chair plays with a notion of furniture as fashion, rather than function. Through its unconventional materials, it is linked to the 1960s fashion for pvc clothing. Brightly-coloured and semi-disposable, it also fits itself into the cycles and wants of the fashion seasons.
The chair formed part of a wider group of disposable and inflatable furniture produced in the late 1960s. Inflatable furniture was fashionable at the same time that architects were developing plans for inflatable structures and inflatable cities - a model for a large-scale inflatable structure was produced by De Pas, D'Urbino and Lomazzi for the Osaka World's Fair in 1967. In their daring do-it-yourself construction and seeming transience, these inflatable environments and their furniture counterparts offered an exciting challenge to the solidity of established modes of living and building.