Gaetano Pesce’s Up Chair Gets Seven New Colorways for Its 50th Anniversary

Some know it by its given name, Up5_6; others, by “La Mamma.” Monikers aside, there’s no denying that Gaetano Pesce’s anthropomorphic armchair-ottoman duo endures as an icon of 1960s design. For its 50th anniversary, B&B Italia has introduced seven new colorways.

New to the series are six solid colorways—orange, red, navy blue, petrol green, emerald green, and cardamom—as well as a special 50th anniversary limited edition featuring retro beige and petrol green stripes that hark back to the palette of Up5’s 1969 debut.

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These new colorways come almost 20 years after the Italian manufacturer’s 2000 reissue of the chair. Unlike Pesce’s vacuum-packed, inflatable original, B&B Italia’s Up5 is formed of cold-shaped polyurethane foam and upholstered in the company’s proprietary technical stretch fabric.

Though five decades have passed since Up5_6’s debut at the Milan Furniture Fair, the symbolism behind its imagery—which fuses the form of a fertility goddess with a prisoner’s ball-and-chain—retains its relevance.

“I was telling a personal story about how I see the woman: despite herself, the woman has always been her own prisoner. And so I wanted to give this armchair a feminine form with a ball at the foot,” says Pesce. “The issue of male violence towards women had only just started being talked about at the time. Back then, I thought that this serious sign of incivility, which was happening all over the world, would have lessened with time, Unfortunately, however, that was not the case.”

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