While there's nothing funny about car accidents or the message behind Gaetano Pesce's UP 5 chair, designed in 1969, this anecdote is worth telling.

First off, the UP 5 chair. The curvaceous form is meant to represent the popular idealization of women's bodies—and it's attached to an Ottoman by an umbilical cord. "This object is a commentary on women's condition in our historical moment," Pesce said in an interview with Italian Journal. "Until today women are prisoners of prejudices including in the most evolved countries without mentioning the less evolved ones…. It was the first time that a chair was able to express a political content."

In addition to the message, what was radical about the chair in 1969 is that it shipped compressed. Which leads us to the aforementioned anecdote from Pesce:

"The chair was then sold wrapped and vacuum-packed, reducing its original volume by 8. A truck full of these packaged chairs was traveling from Milan to Rome and got into an accident when another truck hit it in the back.

"In the accident one of the packages broke open, and the chair inside of it immediately expanded, leading it to break the other packaging and the other chairs to expand.

"In the end, all these chairs protected the back of the truck from being totally destroyed. Also the chairs ended up falling on the highway, and by doing so transformed it into a domestic landscape."

The anecdote aside, Pesce has called the UP 5 chair "One of the most important objects I designed."