Pop Goes the Plastic

There is hardly a mod shop from San Francisco and New York City to London and Paris that does not have its supply of see-through inflatable vinyl pillows decorated with boldly colored patterns silk-screened on the inside. When they first appeared a year ago, pillows seemed like just another passing pop phenomenon. Instead, they have proved to be the precursor of a new school of design that believes furniture ought to be, or at least look, invisible. Using vinyls and plastics, young American and European designers are now mass-producing chairs, sofas and tables that are low in cost, light in weight and suit almost any decor.

Blow Up. One leader in the new field is Manhattan's Mass Art, Inc., a quartet of young naturalized American designers from France, India, Ecuador and Cuba. Mass Art started out last year offering inflatable vinyl pillows for $1. After expanding into tote bags and bubble earrings, it is now making an $80 chair and a $20 table. The chair consists simply of four clear vinyl pillows nesting in a spare aluminum frame, and anybody who sits in one looks like a master of levitation.

The pillows, which form the seat, arms and back, are chemically treated so that the worst thing a cigarette ember can do is burn a hole. If that happens, the pillow is unhooked and a $5 spare substituted. Those with weak lungs can inflate the cushion by attaching it to a hair dryer or the exhaust opening of a vacuum cleaner. Mass Art's next project is a kit of inflatable chairs, sofas, and tables that can furnish an entire living room but be packed into a crate 5 ft. on a side.

Another of Manhattan's new plastics men is Neal Small, 30, who believes that old-fashioned visible furniture is too "weighty, massive and oppressive--like having a dead whale in the living room." Small's answer is cubistic hard plastic chairs and tables, each transparent unit molded as one piece. His small rectangular tables have a surface only 13 in. by 16 in., but four of the units can be clustered to make a square coffee table or lined up in a row to make a long sideboard.

In Paris, three young designers--Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann and Antonio Stinco--have simplified their furniture to the point where two basic units is all it takes to make a roomful of see-through inflatables. One unit is a vinyl "log" nearly 6 ft. long, the other a square pillow 3 in. thick. Hung vertically, six or eight logs form a room divider. Piled up, three or four pillows make a backless seat. Snapped together with built-in tabs, logs and pillows can be combined to form a wide variety of armchairs and sofas.

Farthest out of the see-through designers--at least in name--is Quasar Khanh, a 32-year-old Vietnamese now living in Paris, who appropriated the name of the most distant starlike bodies in the universe to distinguish himself from his better-known wife Emmanuelle, who is a pretty far-out designer of women's clothes. Quasar's furniture also uses just two components: pillows and a hard plastic frame shaped like a squashed three-dimensional U that, standing up, serves as a chair, on its side can be used as a see-through table. "Transparency is the criterion of our age," proclaims Quasar, but like other see-through inflatables, his furniture can be filled with water colored to fit the mood. Or, on a cold night, his pillows can be easily turned into cozy hot-water cushions.

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