French Touch Chair
You’d be forgiven for thinking that a product called the French Touch Chair was simply a chair embodying the certain je ne sais quoi of French design. But, you’d be quite wrong. Rather the French Touch Chair was designed to represent the musical output of artists such as Daft Punk, St Germain, Motorbass, and Phoenix who essentially pioneered French dance music of the 1990s.
A union of disco loops, filters, and house beats, French Touch of the 1990s broke the reign of anodyne French pop ditties preceding it. French Touch was a new era of French music, an almost dream like state digitally composed with layers upon layers of sounds.
Husband and wife team Diogo and Juliette Felippelli of JOOGII, a Los Angeles based design studio, thought it was time to pay homage to the genre and the mesmerising effect that it had. Enter the French Touch Chair.
The chair is made from dichroic film that like dichroic glass is made of two colours but contains reflective properties that allow for multiple colours to be seen – especially from different angles. The film is applied to acrylic and connected by steel bolts. The chair is minimalist, composed of only the seat, a back that is slightly reclined, and legs, two of which are connected at the back, creating a floating sensation for the middle part. Each piece of acrylic is quite thin, but what is especially striking about the chair are the colours. From every angle a new colour is found. The French Touch Chair is lucent and mesmeric, much like its muse.
“My husband and I used to DJ and produce music together so we wanted to create something that was meaningful to us. The genre of 90s French house music was particularly meaningful as it inspired us down a creative path,” said Juliette.
But what specifically about a chair embodies the genre is the ebb and flow of the idea generation process, according to Juliette. “When we started the design, we had intentions to make more of a traditional chair, but the more we developed the concept the project morphed into an artful expression of the chair, which we love.”
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