Architect, furniture designer and textile designer Vernor Panton wanted people to fill their lives with color. He studied architecture at The Royal Danish Academy of Art in the late 1940s, where his teacher Pøul Henningsen piqued his interest in product design. Upon graduating he apprenticed under Arne Jacobsen and was part of the team who worked on Jacobsen's iconic Ant Chair. After a few years he took off for his midcentury version of the Grand Tour, traveling around Europe in a VW bus he'd outfitted as a mobile studio.

Branching out on his own, he used new materials in unexpected ways, letting shapes like cones and hearts inspire chair designs. "The main purpose of my work is to provoke people into using their imagination and make their surroundings more exciting," he proclaimed. In 1958 he designed the Cone Chair, which led to the Heart Cone Chair a year later. Both made their surroundings more exciting wherever they went, most notably a 1961 New York City window display where the chairs, draped in naked mannequins, literally stopped traffic and were ordered removed by the police. They're still drawing attention today.