Tenue Chair
tenue
french
[noun]
comportment, bearing
Photograph by Jialang Cai
Header photographs by Andrew Thomas and Martin Seck
The Tenue Chair plays on the sense of power that comes from transforming oneself through beauty practices while also highlighting the alienation and objectification of self-optimization culture. This chair encapsulates the conflicting emotions of empowerment and self-objectification.
This piece is a component of vanity3000, a vanity scene that satirizes the moralization of beauty practices and their re-branding as ‘self-optimization.’ It was designed, built, and displayed as my Master of Fine Arts in Industrial Design thesis project.
Sketching and form finding explored how a chair can communicate both power and vulnerability
The plump, sinuous form draws on design archetypes by combining the perched revealing rigidity of the secretarial chair and the imposing status-declaring size and plushness of the executive chair.
I pulled from medical references and doctor’s bed upholstery, inspired by the plasticky, medical feeling that’s all about artifice.
The hole in the seat makes the chair revealing in a new and discomfiting way and creates the appearance of a voluminous backside.
Central to the design is the way the chair situates and holds the body.
Fixing posture plays to the variability of optimization – better for whom? What is better posture?
I exaggerated standard chair ergonomics to force a stilted posture.
Making of the Tenue Chair
I constructed the chair’s steel skeleton out of CNC plasma-cut profiles I shaped with slip rollers and reinforced it with bent and welded rod.
I 3D-scanned the skeleton and digitally re-imported it to accurately CNC rout pink foam that filled out the desired shape.
I upholstered the chair with vinyl after affixing foam and batting.
Consultations with professional car upholsterers led me to use steering wheel upholstery techniques. I generated fabric patterns from my digital model and altered them by hand.
Photograph by Martin Seck
Photograph by Andrew Thomas