Designed by Mario Bellini for Cassina in 1976-77, the Cab 412 was the first chair in design history to use a free-standing leather structure with no internal wooden or plastic shell — the hide itself acts as the load-bearing skin over a tubular steel skeleton. The chair entered Cassina’s “I Contemporanei” collection and is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a rare distinction for a production dining chair. Bellini’s own of it — a chair made entirely of saddle-hide, since much imitated — captures why it remains one of the most reproduced silhouettes in Italian design. This set of four consists of hand-stitched saddle leather in a deep burgundy, cut from sixteen individually die-cut panels and closed around the steel frame with concealed zip fastenings running up the inside of each leg, in the manner of a tailored garment. The seat sits on a rubber membrane plate over the tubular frame, with polyurethane foam padding beneath the leather skin. Each chair carries the characteristic tapered leg profile and the visible vertical seam at the backrest that distinguishes the Cab construction from later reissues.
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SILVER Seller in Bari, Italy
