Sometimes included with difficulty in discourses on Scandinavian design, Verner Panton was born a hundred years ago in Gamtofte (Funen Island, Denmark). The most obvious trace of his passage on earth has the unmistakable shape of a chair that bears his name and that when it came on the market, thanks to Vitra, in 1967, was playing a league of its own.
Verner Panton’s most famous chair is back, and you choose the colour
"One sits more comfortably on a colour that one likes" said the designer whose 100th birthday we are celebrating this year. So Vitra, the company that established his fame, is launching a contest to vote on the color of the next edition of the Panton Chair.
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- Nicola Aprile
- 28 January 2026
Verner Panton perpetuates with his works the research on organic forms initiated at the turn of the century by Aino Marsio and Alvar Aalto and expressed with particular evidence in the seating of Arne Jacobsen - whose student he was - especially in the Egg Chair. But Panton's are on a different track. Designed beginning in 1960 as the Stacking Chair and then as the S-Chair, the Panton Chair is the outcome of a curious gaze and an experimental approach to new materials, much to new postures and a flamboyant palette that, in Italian production, would find its full scope a few years later with postmodern designers.
Through color, Vitra is celebrating the first century since the designer's birth by inviting everyone to choose the color of the new Panton Chair. The company that consecrated Verner Panton's reputation by also putting into production other of his chairs such as the Cone Chair, the Heart Cone Chair and the most radical of his industrial products, the Living Tower, will pay tribute to him with a year of initiatives (including a major retrospective exhibition set up in the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein), the first of which is already underway.
On the initiative's dedicated website you can vote among bold orange, flash red, deep magenta, ultra violet, strong purple, electric blue and bright turquoise for a version of the Panton Chair that will be produced in a limited edition, available in two thousand pieces. The colors proposed were sampled from the chromatic kaleidoscope that makes instantly recognizable not only the products, but also the bold Panton's signature interior design projects.