In discussing his controversial Him-Her chair, Italian Designer Fabio Novembre begins by quoting from none other than the Book of Genesis: “The Lord God crafted man from the earth and blew into him the breath of life and man was alive. And then the Lord God took a rib that he had taken from the man and from it crafted a woman and lead the woman unto the man. Now both the man and his wife were naked, and they felt no shame.”

Her Chair. Designed by Fabio Novembre.

Now before you go slapping your head with incredulity or cynically rolling your eyes, consider the character of the designer (you might start by checking out the slew of provocative images on his website-and don’t miss the photos of “Divina Disco Milano,” a club whose bar is backed by a 300 square foot rendering of the vagina from Gustave Corbet’s “L’Origine du Monde”). You’ll quickly realize that Novembre has an avowed inclination toward the erotic, and, further, that he doesn’t minimize or suppress this inclination but, quite the contrary, embraces it with a showman’s aplomb, a clever knack for drawing attention through controversial subject matter.

His (left) and Her (right) Chairs. Designed by Fabio Novembre.

So say what you will about his polyethylene renderings of the curvaceous silhouettes of his Adam and Eve, I find them intriguing, alluring, and apropos, especially with Valentine’s Day fast approaching. Novembre modeled the Him-Her chair after the classic Panton Chair (Verner Panton, 1960). Lauded at the time for its single-piece construction, its cantilevered structure, and its sensuous sculpted form, the Panton (pictured below) persists as an icon of modern design. Novembre refers to his interpretation/homage as “an evolution of the hermaphroditic original.” Though I would have said, “androgynous,” there’s no denying that Novembre’s rendering is an overt acknowledgment of the human form.

Panton Chair. Designed by Verner Panton.

That said, I’m struggling to envision them in mundane locales. They seem more suited to the rarefied spaces of avant-garde artists (Andy Warhol would have had them strewn about his veranda); or perhaps the marble-pillared halls of Dutch Museums (they’d by de rigeur at Amsterdam’s notorious museum of erotica, the Venus Temple); or, even better, the recesses of your (and your significant other’s) imagination-as ever, the crucial ingredient for a memorable Valentine’s Day.