“Bocca” Sofa by Studio 65 for Edra, Italy, 1999

First imagined as a statement piece for an upscale fitness center in Milan, the lip-shaped Bocca sofa — designed by Studio 65 architect Franco Audrito (b. 1943) in 1970 — has a delightfully dizzying history. 

The piece was inspired by an erotic, ruby-red-colored life-size sculpture that surrealist artist Salvador Dalí crafted of pioneering performer and writer Mae West’s famously full lips. But the origins of Dalí’s provocative sculpture, commissioned in the 1930s by the artist’s British patron Edward James, lie in Dalí’s collage Mae West’s Face which May be Used as a Surrealist Apartment, a mixed-media work based on a portrait of West that the artist found in a magazine. 

As part of the fitness center that Audrito was designing, the “lips sofa” he wanted to include would be part of a “Temple of Beauty,” and the architect initially called it “Marilyn” for Marilyn Monroe as well as for Marilyn Garosci, the facility’s owner. It was later renamed Bocca (“mouth” in Spanish) to pay homage to its Dalí roots.

The sofa was manufactured by Gufram, an Italian furniture company founded in 1966 that is renowned for its pursuit of bold, cutting-edge pieces that blur the line between art and design, function and form. Sensual and playful, the Bocca sofa embodies that creative quest. 

Since 1970, the Bocca has been used as a prop in television, film and more, and is celebrated all over the world. It’s included in the permanent collections of a number of museums. Today, two versions of the sofa that differ slightly from one another with respect to materials are manufactured by Gufram (polyurethane and elastic fabric) and Heller (resin polymer plastic).

Every so often a company produces a design so iconic that it comes to symbolize its entire history. For Studio 65, the Italian avant-garde design collective cofounded by Franco Audrito, Piero Gatti and others, this was the Bocca sofa — alternatively known as the “lips sofa,” “red lip sofa,” “Dalí sofa” or Marilyn sofa.”

Studio 65’s lip-shaped seat — modeled after a singular feature from Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí’s portrait of Mae West — became a design icon shortly after its release in 1970 and remains a beloved collector’s item today. The Bocca symbolizes Studio 65’s playful, subversive approach to design. The collective took shape in Turin in 1965 with the goal of avant-garde experimentation. The group would eventually grow to comprise artists, designers and poets, including Roberta Garosci, Enzo Bertone, Paolo Morello and Paolo Rondelli. It would also play a central role in the Italian Radical design movement, the practitioners of which found inspiration in ​Pop art, minimalism and Arte Povera.

The Bocca sofa was born of one of Audrito’s earliest commissions — to design a gym in Milan — which he accepted just a year after graduating from architecture school. The collective enlisted Italian manufacturer Gufram, a firm at the forefront of Italian Radical design, to create a bold red sofa in the shape of plump lips; it was dubbed Marilyn after Ms. Monroe and was an instant sensation when installed at the fitness center.

Studio 65 would follow this with the also iconic Capitello side chair (another Gufram collaboration, now in the permanent collection at The Met), whose reimagining of a decapitated marble classical architectural column in squishy foam was an on-the-nose expression of the group’s pushback to traditional design. It’s a nod they iterated with the Attica coffee table, whose form appears sliced from an oversize column.

Though Studio 65 still operates as an architecture studio under the leadership of Audrito today, the original collective broke up in the late 1970s, making its output from the past decade sought-after fodder for collectors of postmodern, Radical and Italian design.

Find Studio 65 chairs, sofas and other furniture on 1stDibs.