SOM and Ikonstudio are bringing back Halston's iconic office chairs

halston at a desk looking on as a model gazes at her reflection — An archival image of fashion designer Halston in his office with a model

(Image credit: Photo by Dustin Pittman/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images)

When Roy Halston Frowick – the Iowa-born fashion designer better known as ‘Halston’ – designed a garment, he wanted to make it ‘more simple’, ‘more American,’ and ‘more contemporary’, he said.

Halston took a similar approach to his office design, located in an International Style skyscraper designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) in Manhattan. With its vertiginous Fifth Avenue views, red carpet, glass expanses and mirrored walls, the HQ embodied what made the designer the clothier of the 1970s: minimalism, freshness and a healthy dose of sex appeal.

halston sitting alongside a model — Halston and a model

The office also featured minimal chairs specially created for the fashion designer in 1979 by Charles Pfister, who led interiors at SOM for 15 years. The furnishings echoed the modernist qualities of the skyscraper they were in: a gleaming tubular-steel frame and a cantilevered profile that supported the sitter just so.

Though the chair design had the potential to become a design classic, it remained a one-off for Halston’s office. Nearly half a century later, though, SOM has dusted off the design and revived the chair in partnership with Ikonstudio, a contract furniture company owned by Teknion (an earlier collection resurrected designs from Louis Kahn’s archive).

a red cantilevered chair on a red staircase — The revisited chair, ‘SOM79’

Just like Halston’s own seats, the ‘SOM79’ chair features a hand-polished chrome frame and dark leather upholstery. Ikonstudio, however, has reworked it slightly, to align with contemporary manufacturing techniques, ergonomic principles and sustainability standards.

The company has also released a complementary ‘SOM79’ table, which features a matching tubular frame that, when viewed through the transparent glass tabletop, creates the form of an ‘H’ to honour its original patron.

An aerial vivew of a smoked glass table — ‘SOM79’ table and chairs

The chairs were teased in May 2026 at New York Design Week as part of the Afternoon Light fair, and launched in June during Chicago’s Design Days. They are now available to purchase through Ikonstudio, to be specified in homes, offices and hospitality spaces.

A man in a black turtleneck working at a glass table with a tubular base — ‘SOM79’ table and chairs

And there is more in store for SOM: later in the year, in tandem with Form Portfolios, it will launch a new archival collection with the American furniture company Haworth.

‘These works emerged from a moment when architecture firms were deeply engaged in every aspect of the built environment,’ said SOM partner Julia Murphy in a press release, ‘down to the scale of the chair’ – a philosophy, clearly, that has never gone out of style.

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Anna Fixsen is a Brooklyn-based editor and journalist with 13 years of experience reporting on architecture, design, and the way we live. Before joining the Wallpaper* team as the US Editor, she was the Deputy Digital Editor of ELLE DECOR, where she oversaw all aspects of the magazine’s digital footprint.