Wood is not what most people expect to see on austere-looking runway models, let alone what looks like a wooden chair. For artist and furniture designer Pablo Reinoso that is part of the point – he adapts the traditional aesthetics of antique chair designs to create creative custom works of wood art and fashion.

Seen here is a wooden dress, the chair bottom flipped backward, the back elongated and the central structure forming a kind of skirt around the waist – not comfortable but certainly unique.

Other designs by Reinoso include a series of accessories with a strong emphasis on form over function, with bags abstracted to simple shapes consisting of frames but no way to actually carry objects.

While there is a limit to their usefulness, there is something about taking a visual typology and trying to use it in a new context in every way imaginable that does inspire one to rethink the formal language and traditional aesthetics of ordinary objects.

“The «Thoneteando » series is founded on a play on associations and on meditation around Thonet Chair number 14, an icon of industrial design that was created in the mid-nineteenth century. Pablo Reinoso started this series in 2004, working on ‘Thonet geometry’ in connection with geometric movements in art – from the Tibetan mandalas to the geometric art of the 1970s, from the constructivist to the minimalist movements. The encounters thus produced started to reveal other encounters: with absent users, with lived public spaces, the social moment presupposed by a series of chairs, stories that emerge gradually and smoothly from the spirit of these artworks; the absurd aspect of certain encounters, impossible chairs, the ones that materialize their own shadow, the ones that do not let us sit.”