Panton had close links with many of the most important Danish designers, Pøul Henningsen, the lighting designer, had taught him at Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Art. After graduating, he had worked for Denmark’s architectural grandee, Arne Jacobsen. Panton also enjoyed a close friendship with designer-craftsman, Hans Wegner. But whereas Wegner was famed for his skill at modernising classic Danish teak chairs, Panton’s passion lay in experiments with fibregalss and other rapidly advancing man-made materials to create vibrant colours in the geometric forms of Pop Art.

Henningsen introduced Panton to product design. Best known for his bold, abstract lighting, Henningsen had a crisp, clean, unapologetically industrial aesthetic which appealed to Panton. An equally important influence was Jacobsen, whom Panton assisted from 1950 to 1952 on various projects including the famous 1951-52 Ant Chair. Panton later claimed he had "learned more from him than anyone else". Behind the gentle elegance of Jacobsen’s work lay obsessive research in new materials and technologies which inspired Panton.

Panton went on to eke out a living from freelance design and architectural commissions, notably a patented shirt ironed with a rotary iron. In 1955, Fritz Hansen began production of Panton’s Bachelor Chair and Tivoli Chair. But it was not until the Cone Chair’s introduction in 1959 that Panton came into his own with a truly distinctive style. 

Panton’s work became increasingly experimental. He developed the first inflatable furniture – made from transparent plastic film – in 1960 as well as a "total environment" for the Astoria Hotel at Trondheim in Norway where the walls, floors and ceilings were covered in an Op Art-inspired pattern in variations of the same colour. This was the precursor to the later, more fantastical "total environments" which Panton was to create at the Hamburg headquarters of Spiegel magazine in 1969, for the Visiona II exhibition at the 1970 Cologne Furniture Fair (the centre of which was a vividly coloured cave-like space for reclining) and for Grüner & Jahr’s publishing offices in Hamburg in 1973.

He moved to Cannes in 1962, before settling in Basel the following year with his future wife, Marianne Person-Oertenheim. There he began a long collaboration with Vitra, the European licensee of Herman Miller, the US furniture maker. They launched the Flying Chair, a playful piece of fantasy furniture, which was the hit of the 1964 Cologne Furniture Fair, and developed the 1967 Panton Chair, the first cantilevered chair made from a single piece of fibreglass. Sleek, sexy and a technical first, the Panton was the chair of the era. A glossy red Panton featured in Nova magazine’s 1970 shoot in which a model demonstrated "How to undress in front of your husband".

Although he won numerous awards during the 1970s, Panton gradually lost his place at the centre of the design scene. In the cynical post-Vietnam era, the politicised designs of Alessandro Mendini and Gaetano Pesce, seemed more salient than Panton’s playfully optimistic faith in Pop and technology. Whereas other designers of his generation, notably Ettore Sottsass, revitalised their work and ideas by reaching out to younger collaborators, Verner Panton appeared increasingly isolated in self-imposed Swiss exile.

All that changed in the mid-1990s, when mid-20th century modernism in general - and Verner Panton in particular - returned to vogue. Graphic designer Peter Saville chose a 1964 Shell Lamp as the centrepiece of his much-photographed apartment in London’s Mayfair. A 1995 cover of British Vogue featured a naked Kate Moss on a Panton Chair. Panton won yet more awards, his 1960s pieces were put back into production and he was invited to design an exhibition, Verner Panton: Light and Colour, at Trapholdtmuseum in Kolding, Denmark. The exhibition opened as planned on 17 September 1998, but sadly Panton had died in Copenhagen 12 days earlier.