The SOM79 Chair: A Design Born from One of Fashion's Most Iconic Offices
In the world of mid-century and late twentieth-century design, few objects carry a story as compelling as the SOM79 chair. Elegant, minimal, and unmistakably of its era, this racerback seat was not born on a showroom floor or conceived for mass-market consumption. It was created for a single, singular purpose: to furnish the all-red office of one of America's most influential fashion designers, Halston. Today, the chair stands as a testament to the intersection of architecture, interior design, and the cultural energy of 1970s New York.
Who Was Halston, and Why Did His Office Matter?
Roy Halston Frowick — known simply as Halston — was the defining American fashion figure of the 1970s. Celebrated for his fluid silhouettes, ultradeco sensibility, and an ability to dress everyone from Bianca Jagger to Jackie Kennedy, Halston was not merely a designer of clothes. He was a designer of worlds. His lifestyle, his social circle, and his personal spaces were all extensions of the same aesthetic vision that made his runway collections so groundbreaking.
When Halston moved into his Olympic Tower offices on Fifth Avenue in New York City, the space became as legendary as the man himself. He enlisted the help of the renowned architecture and design firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill — commonly known as SOM — to realize a workspace that was both dramatically personal and exquisitely functional. The result was a room drenched entirely in red: red walls, red carpet, red furnishings. It was a bold, almost theatrical declaration of identity at a time when corporate office design trended toward neutral and forgettable.
SOM's Role: Architecture Meets Furniture Design
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is one of the most storied architecture and engineering firms in the world, responsible for landmarks such as the Willis Tower in Chicago and One World Trade Center in New York. But the firm has always engaged with design at every scale, from sprawling urban master plans down to the individual objects that inhabit the buildings they create. The SOM79 chair is a prime example of this total-design philosophy.
Designed in the 1970s — with the "79" in the name nodding to its year or period of creation — the chair was developed specifically for Halston's workspace. SOM's designers crafted a piece that would harmonize with the dramatic, monochromatic environment while offering a refined, modern seating experience. The result was a chair that felt both architecturally rigorous and deeply sensual, qualities that mirrored Halston's own design language.
The Racerback Design: Form Follows Fashion
The most distinctive feature of the SOM79 is its racerback silhouette. The term "racerback" typically refers to a rear cut that exposes the shoulder blades — most commonly associated with athletic wear and swimwear. Applied to furniture, the concept translates into a backrest that is cut away or shaped in a manner that feels dynamic, open, and almost body-conscious. It is a design decision that speaks directly to the fashion-forward context of the chair's origins.
This choice was not accidental. Halston's world was one of bodies in motion, of fabric sculpted to the human form, of negative space used as deliberately as positive space. A chair with a racerback silhouette fits naturally into that visual vocabulary. Rather than a solid, imposing backrest, the SOM79 offers something more like a garment — structured yet permissive, defined yet breathing.
The overall profile of the chair is sleek and low-slung, consistent with the modernist furniture aesthetic that dominated high-design interiors of the period. Clean lines, restrained ornamentation, and a careful attention to proportion make the SOM79 a piece that could hold its own against the saturated drama of an all-red room without being overwhelmed by it.
Why Custom-Made Furniture Matters in Design History
The fact that the SOM79 was custom-made rather than produced for retail is significant for several reasons. First, it places the chair firmly within a tradition of patron-driven design — the idea that the most extraordinary objects are often created in response to a specific person, place, and vision rather than a general market demand. This tradition connects the SOM79 to a long lineage of bespoke furniture, from the commissions of the Arts and Crafts movement to the case study experiments of mid-century California.
Second, it means the chair is inextricably tied to its context. To understand the SOM79, you must understand Halston's office. And to understand that office, you must understand Halston himself — his obsessions, his ambitions, his particular genius for constructing an image of total luxury and ease. The chair is, in this sense, a biographical object as much as it is a design artifact.
The SOM79 Chair's Legacy in Contemporary Design
Decades after its creation, the SOM79 continues to attract admiration from designers, collectors, and design historians. Its story has become part of the broader cultural reassessment of Halston's legacy — a reassessment that has gathered momentum through exhibitions, books, and documentary projects that have reexamined his contribution to American fashion and culture.
For design enthusiasts, the chair represents something rare: a functional object that carries genuine narrative weight. It is not merely a seat. It is a record of a moment when fashion, architecture, and interior design converged around one of the most compelling creative personalities of the twentieth century.
What the SOM79 Teaches Us About Design Today
In an era when furniture design is often driven by scalability, algorithmic trend forecasting, and fast production cycles, the SOM79 chair offers a different kind of lesson. It reminds us that the most enduring design objects are often those created in response to a deeply held vision — objects made not to appeal to everyone, but to perfectly serve one specific idea of how a space should feel and what it should say about the person inhabiting it.
- Custom design elevates both the object and the space it occupies, creating a dialogue between architecture and furniture that mass-produced pieces rarely achieve.
- Fashion and interior design have always been in conversation, with each informing the formal and material vocabularies of the other.
- The best design firms engage with every scale of a project, treating a single chair with the same intellectual seriousness as a skyscraper.
- Objects tied to iconic figures and places carry cultural significance that extends far beyond their immediate function.
The SOM79 chair endures because it is honest about what it is: a custom-made object born from a very specific cultural moment, shaped by the vision of designers who took the commission seriously and a client whose standards for aesthetic excellence were uncompromising. In the story of American design, that kind of convergence is rare. When it happens, it produces objects worth remembering — and in this case, worth sitting in.