In May 2016, a young couple took a spin around Los Angeles in a very unusual mode of transportation: a motorized papasan chair. The two can definitely boast one of the more creative repurposings of this dorm-room go-to, which, when not otherwise transformed into garden planters, solar cookers, or pedicabs, ends up in so many garage sales, Craigslist ads, or dusty corners as the domain of domestic cats.
But how did this cushioned recliner, rounded from rattan and angled atop a matching cylindrical base, find its way into our homes in the first place?
Type papasan.com in your address bar and your browser will redirect you to the website of Pier 1 Imports. The papasan, sometimes called a bowl chair or moon chair, has long been synonymous with the exotic furniture retailer, which sells hundreds of thousands of them each year at its more than 1,000 locations. And the company’s history offers up some clues to the rise of this first-apartment fixture.
According to the International Directory of Company Histories, furniture salesman William Amthor started liquidating extra rattan furniture he had in 1958 at a warehouse—Cost Plus, which grew into Pier 1’s main rival, World Market—along Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Inspired by the business, Charles Tandy and Luther Henderson of the Tandy Corporation, later RadioShack, gave Amthor a loan to open a retail shop under the name Cost Plus in 1962 in neighboring San Mateo. By 1966, their operation was renamed Pier 1, importing inexpensive goods from around the world, especially Asia, and marking them up. The resale cost, however, was still cheaper than other American and European furniture at the time, attracting budget-conscious baby boomers looking to furnish their first homes with the hippie chic of “beanbag chairs, love beads, and incense,” as the Pier 1 website tells it.
While Pier 1’s wares may have originally had a countercultural appeal, its signature papasan chair appears to owe its debut to the object of so much countercultural protest: the Vietnam War. Talking to Julie Moran Alterio in N.Y.’s Journal News in 2002, former Pier 1 CEO Martin Girouard said he introduced the papasan shortly after he joined the company in 1975, having noticed a smaller version of the chair when serving in Vietnam. Misty Otto, a former public relations manager for the company, echoed Girouard. Speaking with Georgetown professor Jordan Sand in 2007 for his article, “Tropical Furniture and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia,” she indicated, as Sand puts it, that “papasan chairs became popular in the United States after American G.I.s sent to Vietnam found them in Thailand and shipped them home,” a practice other vets have noted online. However, Martin Bureau, a Canadian regional manager for Pier 1, mentioned in 2008 that the company has stocked the chair since 1962, just before the U.S. began escalating troop numbers in Vietnam but over a decade before Girouard claimed its introduction.