Tom Dixon was born in Sfax, Tunisia in 1959 as son of a French-Latvian mother and an English father. He moved at the age of four to England and spent his school years in London attending Chelsea School of Art for a brief six-month period before a motorbike accident curtailed any artistic ambition and left him in hospital for three months.
Having dropped out of Art school, Dixon spent two years as a musician, playing bass guitar in a disco band until another motorcycle accident left him unable to play for a period.
In 1983 Tom Dixon began his career as a designer with on-stage performances at Titanic, a London nightclub, during which he welded metal to make seat furniture. That was how the 1987 Tom Dixon "Kitchen Chair", made of frying pans and ladles, came into being. In 1988 Tom Dixon created the "S Chair", which again was deliberately conceived as a piece of seat furniture that was not intended for mass production.
In 1987 Tom Dixon founded his own factory, "Dixon PID", later called "Space", to make these early furniture creations and lighting, either as one-offs or in limited editions. Since the 1990s, Tom Dixon's creations have been less crafts-orientated; some of the earlier pieces have even been adapted to mass production. Both the "Kitchen Chair" and the "S Chair" as well as the "Bird" chaise longue and the "Bird 2" chair have been made by Cappellini since 1992. In 1997 Tom Dixon created the "Star" lamp to be made of polypropylene, which were made by Eurolounge, his own firm.
In 1998 Tom Dixon was appointed head of design by Habitat.
In 2002 he established "Tom Dixon. The Company". Famous for his utterly innovative designs, Tom Dixon is regarded as a star. In 2003 Tom Dixon experimented with tableware: "Eco Ware" is made of a biodegradable material that is 85 % bamboo fiber.
Tom Dixon works as a product designer and an interior decorator both for his own firms and for Cappellini, De Vecchi, Driade, Inflate, Moroso, Salviati, Swarovski, and the fashion designers Jean Paul Gaultier, Romeo Gigli, Ralph Lauren, and Vivienne Westwood.
Tom Dixon's earlier works have been acquired by world famous museums from the Victoria & Albert Museum through to museums in New York, Boston, Paris and Tokyo.
He was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2001 and the most recent accolade included Tom Dixon winning Designer of the Year 2008 from Architektur and Wohnen magazine.
Germany