Last Thursday, during Inside Design Amsterdam, saw the presentation of Prouvé RAW, a collection of Jean Prouvé classics, spawn in a collaboration between denim label G-Star RAW, furniture manufacturer Vitra and the family of self-taught architect and designer Jean Prouvé.

Jean Prouvé, born in 1901, was a French metal worker before he turned his attention to architecture and design. His main achievement was transferring manufacturing technology from industry to architecture, without losing aesthetic qualities. But his design skills were not limited to one discipline. During his career Jean Prouvé was involved in architectural design, industrial design, structural design and furniture design.

And it was exactly those furniture designs that G-Star wanted to reinterpret for their showrooms and offices. Born out of a mutual passion for this French Modernist’s iconic designs, the G-Star and Vitra creative teams have worked for over two years to give some of Jean Prouvé’s best known designs a fresh and contemporary look and feel, while re-discovering the charm of some of his lesser known pieces.

The idea started with adapting Prouvé’s Fauteuil Direction for the office and turned into the creation of a living room collection of seventeen matching pieces. The choice of the design classics came to some extent down to aesthetics, but was mainly influenced by technical reasons, like having an original technical sketch of the design.

The goal was to take the different design pieces and bring them together in one matching collection. The designs stayed very close to the original, but were modernized by changing production techniques, material, color and ergonomics. As the Art Director 3D Design at G-Star, Pieter Kool, explains: “At the beginning of the last century people used to be noticeably smaller. So when we re-designed the Fauteuil Direction we had to make the seating higher. We also implemented new forms of foam and synthetic material. The challenge was to apply these modernizations without changing the basic design as such.”

Nine out the seventeen designs will be available for sale at Vitra.

visit the websites:
G-Star
Vitra
Jean Prouve Museum