Our Living Edge feature today includes several iconic designs by husband and wife team Charles & Ray Eames. Design expert Monique Rappell focuses on the enduring legacy of the Eames' innovative attitude, as evidenced by the 'lean and agile' Aluminium Group office chairs.

Creative people can be a paranoid bunch, believing they're only as good as their last idea. In the contemporary world of the replica, the claim "same same but different" could apply just as well to replica chairs as knock-off handbags in Bangkok. In reality a replica has only one quality - it's cheap.

As two of the greatest designers of the 20^th century, Charles and Ray Eames were surprisingly un-paranoid about their work. While annoyed by knock-offs, they were more concerned about the loss of quality than income. Charles once noted, "What you really worry about … are the bad copies, when your idea is used in a kind of booby way. You don't mind if someone carries your idea further in a better way, although at first your nose may be a bit out of joint." This approach to design was not based on wealth or lack of ego but the fact that the Eames inhabited a realm that very few designers actually visit let alone live in: the realm of genuine playful innovation. In much the same way that salad has never been the same since someone had the vision to mix oil and vinegar, it now seems impossible to imagine a world without innovative (and now classic) Eames chairs.

The most innovative range designed by the Eames may be the Aluminium Group, designed in 1958. Unlike the voluptuous Eames Lounge and Ottoman designed only a few years earlier, the Aluminium Group chairs have a visual simplicity that belies their engineering. Due to their minimal use of material and structure, these chairs are like being in held in a vertical hammock, so that you are supported but mobile. They are lean, graceful and muscular like a male dancer, and like a dancer they work best scantily clad.

As compulsive experimenters, the Eames loved a challenge. The story goes that Charles, Ray, and two other masters of innovation Eero Saarinen and Alexander Girard, were commissioned to design outdoor chairs for the home of the industrialist J. Irwin Miller. In the 1950's the most common outdoor chair was the deck chair, made of canvas stretched over the simplest of wooden frames. Despite this lowly origin, the Aluminium Group chairs clearly reference the deck chair in the use of a continuous surface of suspended mesh or leather stretched over an aluminium frame rather than wood and padding. The Eames had been experimenting with cast aluminium in contemporary furniture, the benefit of cast aluminium being that it allowed for lean, curved forms that combined strength, durability and lightness.

Until this time suspended fabric had been used only to lessen the weight of portable outdoor furniture. To make it a feature of a designer chair took the combination of a  bold commission,  a playful reinterpretation of an outdoor classic, a deep knowledge of ergonomic comfort, the innovative use of aluminium for structure and a no small amount of chutzpah. This sort of form is so familiar to us now, but at that time it was as revelatory as the mini skirt which was to follow only a few years later, similarly all leg and not a lot of fabric.

Genuine innovation does not come about through magic, because if it did it would be easier to copy. Sleight of hand is just a matter of practice. Innovators have more in common with detectives than magicians. Genuine innovation is based on a kind of applied insight in which you ask uncommon questions to make unusual connections. Why bother, I hear you ask? In the case of the Eames, it was insatiable curiosity and pure joy; if they found an idea amusing they would pursue it until it worked, refining detail after detail while remaining true to that idea. The value of an original Eames lies not in the aesthetics (though that's damn important) but the investment made by the designers in first uncovering the concept and then resolving it.

I for one would like to be this chair, a creature of strength and beauty, lean and agile. I would like to have its emotional back story and its design pedigree. When you sit at your desk and lean back into your Aluminium Group chair pondering where next to invest your venture capital millions, let this chair inspire you because now you know: the great irony of the knock-off or the replica is that it will only ever be 'same same' never different.

Monique Rappell is a part-time T&W columnist.