he made his products for young, adventurous people. It was extraordinary to discover all this.” He thought that this approach was what was needed to develop a new kind of design in a decimated Europe. “It took until the 1960s for us to get materials and it was very difficult for manufacturers,” he says. “It was important to do simply shaped objects that could be elegant, but simple in the way they were fabricated.”

From the late 1950s to the 1970s, Paulin designed more than a dozen highly distinctive sculptural chairs for Artifort. Offered in bright colors, they embodied the era’s pop aesthetic, with their biomorphic, streamlined shapes that easily invited personification. Initially named with numbers, they gained descriptives, such as Globe (1959), Mushroom and Orange Slice (1960), the iconic Ribbon (1966) and Le Chat and Tongue (1967).

Apart from designing these powerful, sinuous forms, Paulin developed a fabrication process to support his aesthetic vision. Drawing on the pioneering work of Saarinen and Eames, he moved away from Artifort’s wood frames to tubular steel and abandoned spring cushions for plywood or mesh shells shaped with foam rubber. In addition, the tailored look of traditional upholstery didn’t match his curvy shapes, which called out for a new fluid skin. Paulin’s major innovation, and one that would have a profound impact on the look of furniture for years to come, was a new upholstery method.

By the late 1950s, synthetic stretch fabric was being used increasingly for clothing, especially bathing suits. Inspired by its molded “poured in” look, Paulin got the idea of “dressing” his furniture in stretch fabric to enhance its flowing forms. As an experiment, he cut up some of his wife’s bathing suits and fitted the fabric over miniature models of what would become his Mushroom and Globe chairs, introduced in 1960. “He came and showed them to Mr. Wagemans,” says Monique Beaumont, the current director of marketing, who joined the company in 1970 as Wageman’s secretary and married his son,