There is a chair that has spent more than seventy years on some of the world’s most beautiful terraces. It carries no visible signature, did not come from a design studio in Milan or a workshop in Copenhagen. It was born anonymously on the coast of Guerrero, Mexico, with a metal frame and handwoven cords in colors that seem to capture the light of the Pacific. The Acapulco Chair has appeared at design fairs in New York, Berlin, and Tokyo. Today, it fills the pages of the world’s leading interior design publications. And yet in Mexico, many people live with it without fully realizing what they have.

Mexican design has always existed in a constant dialogue between who we are and how the world perceives us from the outside.

What the MoMA Keeps from Mexico

In 2024, Museum of Modern Art presented Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980, one of the most significant exhibitions dedicated to Latin American design in the institution’s history. Among the most celebrated pieces was the Butaque chair by Clara Porset, a woven cane and laminated wood chair designed in 1957 that now forms part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Porset — a Cuban-born designer who made Mexico her home — was highlighted by the exhibition’s curators as one of ten radical figures who transformed the way modern design could shape everyday life. Her philosophy was clear: modern design did not need to be imported from Europe. It could — and should — emerge from local materials, climate, culture, and the human body itself.

The Butaque proves exactly that. It references Indigenous seating traditions while translating them through modernist rigor and local craftsmanship. Seventy years later, it still feels completely contemporary.

From the Equipal to Pedro Ramírez Vázquez: An Unbroken Line

Long before industrial design existed as a formal discipline, Mexico was already producing objects of remarkable sophistication. The Equipal — a pre-Hispanic chair crafted from leather and wood — remains one of the purest examples of Mexican vernacular design: minimal in material, precise in ergonomics, and still present today in artists’ studios and creative spaces.

It is no coincidence that Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, one of the most influential Mexican architects of the twentieth century, returned to the equipal when designing his own reinterpretation for the collection documented by Clásicos Mexicanos. His version reimagined the traditional form through modern structural solutions while preserving the spirit of popular Mexican craftsmanship.

Visibility

When Álvaro Rego visited the Vitra Design Museum — home to one of the world’s most important collections of industrial design and furniture — he noticed that Mexican design was entirely absent. That was just over a decade ago.

His response was to organize MxSillas, an exhibition that gathered more than 480 proposals from across Mexico in an effort to designate a Mexican chair as a design ambassador for Vitra.

The story reveals something important: the issue has never been the quality of Mexican design. It has been visibility — and perhaps more importantly, self-awareness. Mexico has produced extraordinary objects that the world collects, reproduces, and exhibits. What has often been missing is the narrative connecting them together.

What Is Happening Now

The contemporary conversation is just as rich. Brands like Mexa work directly from Clara Porset’s original archives in collaboration with UNAM, reproducing licensed pieces with updated materials while preserving the original weaving techniques of the 1950s. It is not nostalgia — it is applied research.

At the same time, a new generation of Mexican designers — including Emiliano Godoy and Héctor Esrawe — is creating furniture that circulates through international design fairs and enters the radar of global collectors.

The Mestiza chair, inspired by the equipal and described by its creators as an expression of the fusion between Indigenous and Spanish cultures, has become the bestselling piece in its collection — an object that tells history through form.

What Remains for the Collector?

The question readers should ask themselves is not whether Mexican design deserves a place in the world’s museums. That has already been answered — it is there.

The real question is whether it is already in your home, and whether you understand what it represents.

The Acapulco chair on your terrace. The equipal in the corner of your studio. The Clara Porset piece someone bought in the 1960s.

Mexican design has been living among us for decades without always being called by its proper name.

Maybe it is time to start naming it.