Dutch designers Bernotat & Co have come up with a cool new way of taking a boring conventional chair and turning it into something stylish and practical. These Chair Wear models are an interesting way of jazzing up boring chairs that we think could become great items for wheelchair users.
Chair Wear is custom-made clothing for chairs, adding comfort, functionality and a touch of poetry to old, new and classic chairs. The trendy Chair Wear concepts were first displayed in Bernotat & Co’s Haute Couture collection at Milan Design Week 2012, before they picked out their favourite models to put into production. Like with actual clothes, Chair Wear clothing is expressive, interesting to look at and also adds extra functions to standard chairs, such as pockets or keeping warm.
The intention behind making these clothes for chairs is to re-purpose old chairs and give them a new look. But it struck us that with a few minor adaptations they could do a nice job of sprucing up a wheelchair. For people who spend most of their time in one particular chair it would be great if it could have some additional style, comfort and function to make it more than just an average wheelchair.
For instance, take this model – the wittily named Hoodini – which looks funky and could help keep someone out of the cold and rain. Wheelchair users tend to get quite cold, quite quickly largely because they don’t really get the benefit of being able to move about to warm up. In terms of protecting from the rain, some design details would need adjusting but we think it would be ever so handy to attach one of these to the back of your wheelchair so that if it started to drizzle you could whip it up and stay dry. It almost makes more sense as Wheelchair Wear since it’s colder and wetter outside than in.
Other models of Chair Wear are created with pocket space on them. This seemed to us like another thing that could be handy if adapted for wheelchair use. It would be good to have an easy to access place to carry your essentials which looks better than the wheelchair bags currently out there. Most wheelchair bags tend to look at best dull and at worst tacky but a Chair Wear take on them could be more stylish.
The design below, named The Big Baggy, could be a good basis for a wheelchair model, although one would have to consider the problems involved in coming up with a design that works like this and allows the user to reach their wheels. It’s based on a workman’s overalls and has lots of pockets which could store all sorts – there’s even a designated pocket for your ruler. With some small changes this could be a wheelchair cover and a bag.
The people at Bernotat & Co tell us that, because the Chair Wear products were conceived for indoor use on regular (dining) chairs, they are not sure whether they will fit on wheel chairs or meet the more heavy requirements of outdoor use. But the designers were really positive about the idea of making the changes so that they can be used by wheelchair users.
We think that these Chair Wear clothing designs are a really innovative idea and would love to see them in ‘wheelchair mode’. What do you think about them?