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A brief history of...The Lips sofa

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December 2024

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A brief history of...The Lips sofa

Who designed it?

Prolific Spanish artist Salvador Dali is the mastermind behind the original iteration. It began as an installation called The Mae West Room (1936), then a series of five lips sofas were made in collaboration with British arts patron Edward James in 1938. Dali was one of the foremost figures in the Surrealist movement, which existed predominantly between the 1920s and 1950s.

Whose lips are those?

The famous lips belong to Mae West, a Hollywood sex symbol in the 1930s. Fun fact: she was once charged with obscenity and sentenced to 10 days in jail for a Broadway production she wrote, produced and starred in.

Not gonna lie, it's a little weird. The whole point of surrealism was to distort the ordinary and find beauty in the uncanny, so yes, it's meant to be a little peculiar.

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