Philippe Starck has designed numerous plastic chairs, always seeking to lower their cost without compromising their quality. One means is to mould the chair entirely as a single piece, as here, reducing assembly and handling costs to a minimum. The Louis Ghost armchair, and related chairs designed for Kartell in Milan, is made from injection-moulded polycarbonate, a very strong, glassy plastic. Starck's rendering of a late eighteenth-century form of armchair evokes historic good taste, but is sharply contrasted by the icy perfection of the transparent plastic, which is more suggestive of modernity and the future than of the past. The Louis Ghost chair, therefore, combines all the glamour of the Salon with the efficiency of an industrially made product. In the first three years of its production over 100,000 chairs had been sold.