In 1985 Tom Dixon joined designers Nick Jones and Mark Brazier-Jones to form Creative Salvage, a group dedicated to producing furniture and decorative objects made from scrap metals. Their work with recycled materials was very influential on a generation of designer-makers. Dixon's favourite technique in the 1980s was welding and the frame of this chair is welded steel while the upholstery is made from rush. The rushwork here was done by a British basket-making firm. At this point in his career, Dixon did not use drawings, building the chair and altering and changing the design as it was developed in his studio. The name of the chair is a reference to its sinuous shape which is like the letter 'S'.
The frame of this chair was the original pattern for about 60 chairs made in Dixon's London workshop in the late 1980s. Subsequently, production was taken over by the Italian manufacturer Cappellini which introduced many variants of the S Chair.