How Inflatable Furniture Of The 90s Perfectly Predicted The Future Of Almost Every Single Millennial
Shiny and futuristic in theory, deflating in reality — kind of like the future of most Millennials.
Canva Pro I distinctly recall the first time I ever saw an inflatable chair: it was the summer of 1998, and this catalog called Just Nikki, which appeared to be like the mailbox staple dELiA*s but on steroids, had an entire section of delightfully impractical home goods.
There was even an inflatable 3-seat couch and a whole bed.
I didn’t actually know a single soul who had inflatable furniture. I remember going to the Jersey shore and practically wanting to live in this store that had a neon pink inflatable couch and orange chair, complete with Clueless-esque feather pens, faux fur-covered journals, and a rug where I shudder to think how many Beanie Babies died for it.
So it was a relatively rare sight in the wild that didn’t seem to exist in as many homes as those catalogs would have you believe.
But I saw that blue and purple chair in the Just Nikki catalog that would match my hair in a few years, and wanted one oh so badly. A shimmering beacon of blue Jell-O, so much unlike the dull gray and floral wallpapered room I shared with my sister.
Another beautifully bizarre item that seemed to only exist in video games and TV shows, but that would be rejected from my Iron Curtain household for not being old, cheap, or hideous enough.
The cruddy little house I refused to call home was a time capsule to 1976, complete with a TV antenna that resembled a pole and had to be rotated just right when the screen got too static-y. I longed to leave, abusive cohabitants notwithstanding, so I could have the best of both vintage and modern.
In just five years, I’d be 18, and could have my own apartment that looked just like the cool places where the Moxie girls rode skateboards and listened to Metallica and Pantera, yet could pull off a vinyl tube top and heels.
And I planned on buying all of that Manic Panic blue inflatable furniture when I was a legal adult with my own money, and couldn’t be told how to spend it. It would make a nice contrast to the black walls I planned on painting for my NYC goth cave.
While I managed to score my own place by the age of 20, I never got to paint from a combination of executive dysfunction and enjoyment of luxuries like having security deposits returned.
I realize that, in the late 90s, from a business standpoint, inflatable furniture was a surprisingly easy sell back then.
If not for the tween market, for college students and young people getting that first apartment when “18 and out” was actually still possible. It was portable, could be deflated and stowed away, plus brands picked up on them to slather their logos all over that polyurethane goodness.
Inflatable chairs and sofas were emblazoned with South Park, Nickelodeon, and Britney Spears imagery among dozens of original designs before art theft became a common occurrence.
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There’s probably a Surge inflatable chair hidden away in a warehouse in Albuquerque that’s a holy grail like the E.T. cartridges the Angry Video Game Nerd dug up.
The 90s were a brightly-colored time with genuine and false hope as sweet as said cans of Surge, and we wanted the lifestyles in those catalogs even more than the strappy dresses, platform shoes, neon bead curtains, and nail polish that came in squeezy tubes.
They made being a 13-year-old girl look so much more fun and mature than it actually was. And I just wanted a cool room with a neon or jewel colored Jell-O chair, and suddenly I too would have fun slumber parties, cable TV, and boys calling about things other than chemistry homework instead of dissociating from the constant trauma I was dealt by playing Heroes of Might and Magic and watching skip-ridden VHS tapes of Daria.
Then one day in 1999, I miraculously got my wish. One of the junk stores my mother practically lived in got inflatable chairs in stock, which meant they were probably going to go out of style soon.
Normally, I’d be sad about this — couldn’t I experience at least one thing as it actually happened instead of repeatedly being made to wait, or skip it altogether? — but this time I didn’t care.
It was just too cool a concept to pass up! I was finally going to live the dream of having my very own Jell-O chair; the fact that it was tree frog green was just a bonus.
I was truly living the dream, yo. I spent many an afternoon barefoot in my Lee Pipes, curled up on it, writing horrendous poetry and listening to The Fragile on repeat on my Discman.
The only proper way to lounge in an inflatable chair was to plant your butt directly in the center, with your legs hanging over the arm as the other arm comfortably propped you up.
Being fully grown at 5'' even, it was the perfect chair for me. Because if you sat in it “normally”, there was the odd sensation of what I imagine being swallowed by a whale was like, and trying to climb your way out.
Plus, your feet were on the cold ground with no back support, and well, screw that, that’s what a normal chair is for!
The Jell-O chair was for ultimate slacking, for telling your homework to eat your shorts while paper college applications piled up around you and you seriously had no idea what to major in or why your parents insisted you had to go or else your life would be worthless.
Pumping it with air was a pain, and it would deflate a little every few days. I’d know it was time for a refill if it looked as baggy as a pair of JNCOs.
Or when it would troll me if I hopped on but felt like a parody of a waterbed as I grimly realized my butt was about to hit the floor and my legs couldn’t be propped up.
Nevertheless, my frog-green Jell-O chair held up for a shockingly long time. It survived the first two years of the Bush administration!
But while it felt like I was on a cloud when lying in it sideways if it was properly inflated, soon the Jell-O chair I had wanted so badly began to feel symbolic when the day came that I grew disillusioned with using a tire pump just to have a place for lounging.
The inflatable chair looked shiny and futuristic, about to realize the hope for a better life I’d been carrying with me upon realizing childhood wasn’t supposed to be this awful.
It exuded the modernity I longed for and didn’t have at home: both my actual household and the city that was so set in its ways. But I had to wear long pants if I didn’t want to chafe on them, having to peel them off my thighs like a Fruit Roll-Up.
One stray loose stud, pencil, or even a fingernail could end it. I did just that, even after changing clothes, patched it up with duct tape, and it held until one day it just lost its cloud-like form, tiredness with pumping notwithstanding.
While the inflatable aspects made Jell-O furniture great for moving and storage, and a fun novelty as a 14-year-old, my 19-year-old butt, covered in safety-pinned fishnets and studded vests, just wanted to pass out on something upon coming home from CB’s.
A couch dumpstered from the curb was more optimal. My entire body didn’t hit the ground when I woke up on it, and no pumping was required.
Did my parents, with their free college and cheap home prices, have to do all this additional work to enjoy their then-modern furniture? Nope.
Why did I let myself be duped by this cool-looking thing that wound up being so much additional work just so I could literally get off the ground?
But the late 1990s and early 2000s were the last time that we could be easily hoodwinked with some slick designs and just take whatever companies had to give us.
Slower communications and a lack of cohesive Internet culture back then were both a gift and a curse.
Amazon was in its early stages and only sold books; we couldn’t look up reviews of inflatable chairs. There was no YouTube to find videos of Jell-O couch fails.
While you couldn’t pay me to be in my teens again, I have this urge to revisit that tumultuous point in history, knowing what I know now about business, boys, and properly decorating an apartment with real furniture.
I look back on the design aesthetics that were popular at the turn of the millennium.
Those iMacs that had candy-colored clear components juxtaposed to the white casing, the tubular silver lights, and matching chairs I saw in photos of all the “cool” publishing and games jobs that I had no idea were out of reach for me, shiny black vinyl in The Matrix: everything seemed so bold and unafraid to dream.
Even the inanimate objects. We weren’t just speeding towards a new decade; it was a new century, a new freaking MILLENNIUM. How rare was that? Clothes, gadgets, furniture, and decor had to reflect it.
Something about those designs symbolized how hopeful we were then. It was a strange time that wanted to move forward into this scary new age, yet also cling to how the world was in the 20th century.
It was evident in the bright colors juxtaposed to the minimalist black and white of the mid-1990s, exaggerated wide-leg pants were worn with skintight crop tops, and we still relied on landlines (now with caller ID!), but people from around the world started to talk to each other on Web 1.0.
Our parents warned us about talking to strangers on the Internet, only to give in to Fox and Q in barely two decades.
Inflatable furniture seemed like the wave of the future; it only fit in with this evolution from beanbag chairs and freeform design, only seen in Silicon Valley before it ended up in shopping malls across the country.
That inflatable furniture from this era feels eerily symbolic for how many of our futures turned out.
We were promised shiny, bright, and modern things that were both different and better than what our parents had. But when we eagerly got them, we wound up with a butt full of concrete, and something that barely lasted.
And that took so much extra ongoing prep work on our part to get barely the same reward. It was like that with school, jobs, dating, you name it.
Seems like too much of a coincidence that my generation got these “once in a lifetime” catastrophic events. I remember the world grinding to a halt because of one school shooting around the time I got that Jell-O chair; now there’s an entire industry of bulletproof backpacks and child bunkers.
Maybe we went from Just Nikki catalogs to Instagram influencers, and bead curtains to Zoom-friendly shoji screens, but now I seek the cutting-edge beauty of that sapphire plastic couch and the comfortable stability of the first IKEA mattress I bought with my own money.
We don’t have to sacrifice beauty and modernity for utility, and can rest on things without needing to inflate them first. The racket is over.
Rachel Presser is a writer, business consultant, game developer, and jeweler from The Bronx and currently residing in Los Angeles with her monitor lizard. Rachel writes for law firms and businesses, but is also frequently featured in Reptiles magazine and co-ran The Ace Space on Medium.
