BAPE X MODERNICA'S EIFFEL CHAIR SOLD FOR $899 IN 2022

BAPE and Modernica's ABC Camo Side Shell Eiffel chair costs $899, and the company that engineered its shell spent World War Two building radar domes for fighter planes. That detail is not trivia. It explains why the chair looks and is built the way it is, camo upholstery included.

The chair exists because a Tokyo streetwear label kept coming back to a shape that Charles and Ray Eames tested at a design competition in 1948. BAPE did not just slap a logo on furniture. It found a factory still running the original tooling and asked for camo.

February 26, 2022. $899. One Store.

On February 26, 2022, BAPE and Modernica released the ABC Camo Side Shell Eiffel chair for $899, exclusively at BAPE STORE LOS ANGELES and on US.BAPE.COM. Every unit shipped upholstered in BAPE's ABC Camo pattern, seated on Modernica's Eiffel Base, with a joint BAPE Head and Modernica logo stitched into the back.

The Side Shell is the plain backed version of Modernica's three chair lineup, separate from the Arm Shell that adds armrests. The Eiffel Base is the wire frame leg structure named for its resemblance to the Paris tower, a Modernica design language that predates BAPE by decades. BAPE built its whole identity on scarcity pricing like this long before streetwear had a name for it, so a four figure chair fit the brand's playbook better than it looked at first glance. Resale listings on StockX still track the ABC Camo shell years after the drop sold out.

Irv Green and Sol Fingerhut Paid Half the Machinery Bill

Charles and Ray Eames built the original shell chair with Zenith Plastics, a company that spent the war years manufacturing radomes, the fiberglass nose cones that housed radar systems on military aircraft. Zenith's owners, Irv Green and Sol Fingerhut, had never made furniture before the Eames came calling for their 1948 entry into the Museum of Modern Art's International Competition for Low Cost Furniture Design.

Green and Fingerhut were curious enough about the switch that they covered roughly half of the $5,000 machinery cost themselves. The shell material, a fiberglass reinforced polyester called Zenaloy, had been developed by the US Army during the war for entirely different purposes. A streetwear camo chair, in other words, is sitting on top of military materials science that has nothing to do with fashion at its origin.

Every Shell Comes Out Slightly Different

A Modernica shell is still hand laid, one chair at a time, inside the company's Los Angeles factory. Workers layer fiberglass with pigmented resin by hand, then a press pushes the resin through the fibers to unify them into one rigid shell.

That process is why no two shells match exactly. Fiber pattern, pigmentation and translucency shift slightly from piece to piece, and Modernica describes itself as steadfast in preserving those original production methods since 1999, running equipment tied back to the same lineage of presses Zenith once used for airplane parts. The ABC Camo upholstery goes on after the shell cures, sewn over the finished fiberglass rather than molded into it.

This Was Not BAPE's First Chair

BAPE and Modernica had already worked together once before the 2022 release. Hypebeast covered an earlier shell chair and side table capsule between the two brands in February 2019, sold exclusively in Los Angeles. The pair returned again for spring 2025 with a wider Eiffel chair run in blue, green and pink.

Three collaborations across six years is a pattern, not a marketing stunt run once and forgotten. BAPE keeps sending its camo back to the same mid century American factory instead of chasing a new furniture partner, which says more about where the brand wants its logo to live than any lookbook could.

Look at the Chair, Not the Camo

The ABC Camo pattern is BAPE's signature, but the shell underneath predates streetwear entirely, a Charles and Ray Eames shape from a 1948 MoMA competition still produced on tooling descended from a company that once built parts for fighter planes. Herman Miller just redesigned the Aeron's aluminum base for the opposite reason, cutting 1.85 pounds of metal instead of adding a pattern to it, proof that furniture design is having a real moment sneaker coverage has not caught up to yet.

This one reads early, not late. BAPE has run the Modernica collaboration three times since 2019 and Modernica has not touched the shell shape in nearly eighty years. That consistency, more than the camo, is the actual reason a $899 chair holds its value.