Many designers across Europe were designing amusing, brightly coloured, plastic furniture in the late 1960s. In Finland, Eero Aarnio designed several chairs that were variants on sphere shapes. The domed base of this low armchair meant it could, quite literally, rock and roll when someone sat in it, a metaphor for the youthful, relaxed lifestyle that dominated Pop design in this period. The two halves of the chair were moulded from fibreglass, joined in a seam around the circumference of the circular chair. Fibreglass was still a relatively new material for furniture in 1968 and gave designers new freedoms in the forms their furniture could take. The Pastilli chair was launched at the Cologne Furniture Fair in 1968 and rapidly won its designer many awards in Europe and the USA. The V&A acquired this chair for an exhibition about modern chair design, held in 1970.