Brionvega × Wella

Announced October 2, 1969 at Brionvega's Milan showroom, the FC 800 started with a Wella request for a home dryer that behaved like its salon hoods. Zanuso and Sapper replied with the logic of the TS 502 and the Algol: a closed volume whose handle folds into the body and comes out only when needed. Closed, it is an 11 cm cube of arancio ABS. Swing the chrome frame down from the rear edge and it becomes a pistol-grip hand dryer. Brionvega named it, as it named its televisions, after a number: 800, for the watts.

Wella supplied the parts a hairdresser would check first. The heat dial reads 40°, 55° and 70°, the bonnet temperatures Wella specified for a permanent, a colour and a set, so the owner chooses by what she has done to her hair. On the left face sits a white clockwork timer, 0 to 60 minutes, the same dial Wella fitted to its salon hoods, which cuts the element and leaves the fan running for a minute of cool air. A ribbed rubber hose clips to the nozzle and feeds a quilted bonnet. Hose and bonnet live in a flat black case whose lid has a square recess; set the cube in it and the hood station is complete.

Domus photographed it beside a TS 502 and called them siblings. German reviewers ignored the cube and asked where the bonnet could be bought alone, which Wella then supplied to salons for clients waiting on busy Saturdays. Sapper disliked the whine of existing dryers and had the fan cut from nine blades to seven, bringing the tone down to roughly the A below middle C. Brionvega's service manual uses this as a test: a unit that sings higher has a damaged impeller.

It sold well in Milan, Turin and Düsseldorf and slowly elsewhere. By 1971 salons were abandoning sets under the hood for blow-drying with a round brush, and the bonnet began to look like a photograph of one's mother. The hand-dryer mode kept it in shops for another year; the timer outlived it in many kitchens, used for eggs.