The Serie Up chair’s anniversary edition
A ‘feminist’ armchair turns 50
Times have changed: in 1969 you could get away with claiming that your voluptuous pop-up armchair, inspired by the female form in recline and nicknamed “Big Mama”, was a bold feminist statement. In 2019, you’d struggle — rightly — to do the same. But Gaetano Pesce, the designer of the Serie Up chair, whose amorphous shape (UP5) and spherical ottoman (UP6) are instantly recognisable, is having a good go, remarking that his furniture highlights women’s position as “global prisoners of prejudice”. The spherical ottoman attached to the curvy chair is apparently intended to symbolise a ball and chain.
First, though, there was the sponge. “I realised when I was taking a shower, that when I pressed the sponge in my hand, the volume reduced, a lot,” the Italian design pioneer tells Esquire, from his New York studio. “So, I thought if I did a chair without structure inside, only foam, I can sell the chair like a disk, and people can go home, open the envelope and see the chair going up by the mechanical force of the foam coming back to the original volume.”
Then came the women. When Pesce was seven or eight, he was transferred, either by accident or design, to a girl’s school. There, Pesce says, he developed a deep appreciation for the female brain. “It is very elastic, it is very composite, it is not monolithic,” he explains. Really, the opposite of men.
Pesce’s design, known as “Donna” and “Blow Up”, as well as “Big Mama”, has gone through plenty of iterations since 1969. For its 50th anniversary, it is released in beige and petrol green stripes, referencing its original colour palate and something deployed to full, optical, Sixties effect in B&B Italia’s Milan showroom recently, where Pesce oversaw an installation with stripes running across floors and up walls, chairs liberally scattered around. Proof of Up’s legacy as an object of superior comfort was underlined by a shop full of people, feet up, reading, messaging, listening to music or lost in their own thoughts. “It is very comfortable!” the 79-yearold Pesce agrees. “But I believe design has to be very comfortable, very practical.”
Serie Up is in the permanent collection of MoMa in New York, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Vitra Design Museum in Rhein. But its anniversary is bittersweet. “In some countries, the situation for women is worse than it was 50 years ago,” Pesce says. “I hope this is something people can recognise. At this moment, design becomes a kind of art.”
○ £4,450; bebitalia.com