All Photos By Gail

Named after Blanche Dubois, the self-deluded protagonist of Tennessee Williams’ 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire, Shiro Kumata‘s Miss Blanche Chair (1988) is an icon of postmodern design. Kamata originally experimented with embedding natural roses in the chair, but the flowers burned in the acrylic resin, so he instead used artificial flowers.

“It has to be fake because Blanche Dubois is fake,“ Kuramata said. The synthetic roses appear to float within the chair’s acrylic body, which rests on purple tubular aluminum legs. The tranquil design belies its painstaking construction process – each Rose was held in place with tweezers while the surrounding resin hardened.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC