Chloé is Bringing a Rare 70s Design Oddity Back to Life

by OS Staff
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Fashion’s current obsession with interiors usually lands in one of two ways: either aggressively polished lifestyle branding, or a vague attempt to make clothes feel more “immersive.” Chloé’s latest move is more interesting than that. For Milan Design Week 2026, the house has reissued the Tomato Chair, a bulbous, playful piece first designed in 1970by Christian Adam in collaboration with Poltronova, one of the key names associated with Italy’s Radical Design movement. 

Unveiled under the direction of Chemena Kamali, the project pushes Chloé’s world beyond the wardrobe and into the home — but without losing the softness and sensuality that have defined Kamali’s work at the brand so far. The chair’s swollen, rounded silhouette, which deliberately flirts with the shape of a tomato, sits somewhere between sculpture, furniture and visual joke. It is the kind of object that does not really care whether you take it seriously, which is part of what makes it feel alive. 

That tension is central to the appeal. Originally created during a more liberated and experimental design moment, the Tomato Chair proposed a different relationship between body and object: softer, more instinctive, less rigid. Chloé’s official framing of the re-edition leans into exactly that history, describing the piece as expressive of comfort, sensuality and freedom of form — qualities that also happen to map neatly onto Kamali’s current reshaping of the house. 

And that is really why this works. The chair is odd, yes, but not random. Kamali’s Chloé has been building a vocabulary of organic lines, ease, tactility and emotional softness since her debut, so the decision to resurrect a tomato-shaped design relic from the early 1970s feels less like a stunt than a spatial extension of that same mood. This is an interpretation based on Chloé’s stated reasons for the reissue and on the visual affinity between the chair’s rounded form and Kamali’s recent work for the house. 

The new edition stays close to the original while updating it through contemporary production techniques. Chloé says the chair is being offered as a made-to-order re-edition in soft naturally tanned leather, in cream, cognac, sand and black. That material shift matters: it keeps the object plush and tactile, but gives it a more polished luxury finish than a straight archival reproduction might have done. Original 1970s versions were only produced in limited numbers and are now considered highly collectible. 

The chairs are on view at the Chloé Milan boutique, Via della Spiga 30, from April 22 to 26, 2026, as part of Milan Design Week. In a week full of overdetermined design gestures, the Tomato Chair lands with a lighter kind of confidence. It is playful, a little surreal, and just self-aware enough to avoid becoming kitsch. 

Photos: Chloé

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