If the '80s sent new millionaires scrambling to buy the latest leather mechanical massage table at Sharper Image, the new rich of the dot-com boom sought a more self-conscious reward. Basically, Lewis' theory goes, Aeron chairs weren't just sleek and ergonomic, they were a way for companies to put a dollar value on an industry that, so far, couldn't reliably claim one.

"What's the value of a human being sitting at a desk, working on a Web page?" asks Lewis. "What's the value of the Web page? In the past people were coming to me saying, 'The value is in click-throughs [on a banner ad]!' This invisible nonmoney was being justified by people sitting in really expensive chairs and claiming certain technological advances."

Notions of value grew ever screwier as the dot-com boom crested. V.C.s pumped tens of millions of dollars into companies that had yet to actually demonstrate an ability to attract customers; the NASDAQ passed 5,000; and it was often declared, without a trace of sarcasm, that "a new millionaire is born every [minute/day/hour] in Silicon Valley." And while those indicators looked suspiciously symptomatic of an outbreak of mass hysteria, the Aeron chairs plainly connoted value.

And not just dollar value, but cultural worth too. For an industry both bold and young, built out of the strip malls and office parks of Silicon Valley, Aeron chairs implied cultural heft. Expensive, produced by an established furniture company with indisputably classy roots -- a company sanctified by none other than New York's Museum of Modern Art, whose permanent collection includes a number of Herman Miller designs, including the Aeron -- the chairs left no question about their price and heritage. Thanks to the money coming in from investors, a start-up with little hope of honoring its five-year lease could fill cubicles with chairs that had been ordained "the design of the decade."

The chairs were also a concrete way for companies to show off the kind of egalitarian workplace that the new economy had ushered in. It's a strain of idealism that Lewis has no patience for: "The whole notion of, like, having your baseline workers sitting in these chairs was just beyond insanity to us." But read it differently and the scent of a more optimistic era comes through. Take, for example, the way one tech worker remembers her first Aeron.

"At XOOM.com we had the worst chairs, the worst desks," says Janine Popick, who now runs her own start-up, VerticalResponse, which is furnished entirely with furniture culled from dot-com auctions. "So when we went public, the cool thing they did for us was buy us new chairs."

According to the new-economy ethos, work would be fun; it would be comfortable and ergonomic and its corporate beneficence would exclude no one. And if a company was lucky enough to hit the jackpot with its IPO, then it would spread the wealth. With qualified workers harder and harder to find, the Aeron chair was a symbol of the company's eagerness to please.

"When March First San Francisco was USWeb/CKS and had only 80 people," recalls former March First employee Jennifer Deming, "we ordered a shipment of about 100 Aeron chairs, custom-fitted to each employee. Each employee got to pick the size, whether or not it had lumbar support, and the elevator lift to adjust height. Quite a perk in boom time 1998. They ran about $800 apiece. The old padded black chairs were moved to the storage room and basement."

Today, Aeron chairs are unwanted proof of excess. Even Herman Miller is doing its best to shed the dot-com connotation. The Aeron chair, says company spokesman Sherman, will outlast its dot-com fad reputation. "Because the chair was so enormously popular with technology companies," says Sherman, "we understand the sort of connection that some people have made in their minds." But dot-coms are just a tiny fraction of Herman Miller's target audience: "If we look at the 100 largest companies, actually the dot-coms comprise less than 5 percent."

Herman Miller's attempt to distance itself from dot-com Aeron-mania may, however, be hazardous to one of its newest product lines. In November 2000, the company launched Red, a line of relatively low-cost office furniture designed for "fast young companies." Red, the Web site predicts with boom-era glee, "expects to be the first stop fast, feisty businesses make when they need places to park more young geniuses."

Asked whether launching a dot-com-oriented venture at precisely the same time that such companies were collapsing made good business sense, Red brand manager Greg Parson said that many core elements behind Red furniture -- risk taking, egalitarianism, individualism -- are here to stay.

"Actually, our timing was kind of good. I mean it would have been great if we'd started this two years ago, but we kind of saw this early on. We developed Red for businesses that were still around, [incorporating] a lot of [what] came out of the dot-coms: business culture and attitude."

Meanwhile, just as the Aerons once symbolized success, they now have a different meaning. "They'll forever remember the stretch limos, the Herman Miller Aeron chairs, the long lunches, the open bar, the matching Beemers in the garage," mourned Tom McNichol in the Montreal Gazette. And in San Francisco, a group of artists used Aeron chairs, business cards from defunct companies and Ikea desks in an exhibit called "Dot-Gone."

Lewis, despite his investigation, has sat in an Aeron chair only once, at a friend's music studio. But Lewis is still thinking about the dot-com boom and bust in terms of butt pedestal popularity.

"It was just this thing," says Lewis. "It could have been anything, but it happened to be the most stupid, ridiculous thing we could think of." On the other hand, Lewis says, in reference to his investigation, "maybe it was more about us being a bit jealous, you know?"

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