White Plastic Chairs Are Taking Over the World - VICE
Across the street from my Brooklyn apartment sit a stack of white plastic chairs, slowly accumulating a layer of snow. On the other side of the country, three more of those same chairs are scattered around my parents' pool, while in Yemen, I imagine, rows upon rows of them are lined up for a wedding. Others float in a massive trash heap in the Pacific, there are probably more still in an old woman's home in South America, piled with magazines. I imagine there is at least one such white plastic chair circling us somewhere in orbit. Maybe that seems benign to you, but in truth, the ubiquity of those white chairs is terrifying, and a very bad sign for the state of world culture. The first cheap, lightweight, stackable, injection molded plastic chair—called a monobloc chair—was probably designed in 1967 by an Italian named Vico Magistretti, then mass produced in the 70s by a company called the Grosfillex Group, but since there are no original patents, nobody really knows who was first resp