A furry pink nest to incubate the fabulous dreams of youth

 

    Bean bag chairs. Remember those? Great vinyl sacks of styrofoam pellets, in banana yellow and candy apple green. The style originated in 1968 by a trio of Italian designers and called the Sacco chair and considered "one of the icons of the Italian anti-design movement." That original chair was more pear shaped, and considered haut decor enough to find itself into several museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art.

    By the early 1970s, it was shaped more like a squashed tomato, and available from Sears. I remember wanting one, vaguely, without ever going so far as to express that desire to my parents, whose tastes ran to Scandinavian design, for themselves, and ranch oak, for us children. They must have loved ranch oak — a dark style of wood. I had a ranch oak bed, dresser, desk. I hated it.

     I probably didn't want the chair so much as the lifestyle that went with it. My pals and I would recline on my bean bag chairs, listening to Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer and be cool.  I think I was too cool to even want the bongs that went along with that.
    That thought came back to me as I was walking Kitty one morning last week, and came across this hot pink monstrosity set out for the trash. A quick Google image search identified it as a Himalayan Pink Faux-Fur Hang-A-Round Chair, available in the Teen section of Pottery Barn, which goes without saying. A 12-year-old girl's idea of what adult female elegance might be. My heart broke a little, seeing it, while admiring the damn-what-the-neighbors-think panache of whoever set it out. I'd be embarrassed.

    Because such novelties grow old. I never did own that beanbag chair, but those who did soon came to regret doing so. "The beanbag chair became a summary cliche of the 1960s. It was freedom in a brand-new bag — but it offered so much freedom it quickly led to stiff limbs and deadened buttocks," wrote Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov in their 2005 Blobjects and Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design. "In the end, the beanbag chair was a miniature parable on the limits of freedom."

     I hope somebody picked it up, and that it's embellishing the bedroom of some scrap dealer's 10-year-old daughter, like a promissory note from the adult world — someday, my dear, you will manifest your own style, and be fabulous and colorful and take your ease in wacky, furry chairs. 
     If you see it and just have to have one, well, bless your heart. Pottery Barn doesn't carry them anymore. But Walmart has a chair very much like it, the Mainstays Blair Plush Faux-Fur Kids Saucer Chair, for $32.98, which is a perfect price for furniture for that short period between the time kids are too energetic to arrange themselves into such a sling, to when they slink off to college and put away their childish things. It also comes in gray, peach and white.

     Those machines aren't ruling the world quite yet. The downside of using company web site for blog research is that achingly stupid store algorithms can't differentiate between momentary professional interest and actually being a potential customer.