50 Years an Icon: Le Bambole by Mario Bellini

B&B Italia celebrates the historic collection of sofas and armchairs with a radically renewed version, more comfortable and increasingly sustainable.

15/04/2022 – The iconic Le Bambole sofa designed by Mario Bellini in 1972 turns 50. To celebrate, B&B Italia presents a new version, designed in the name of comfort and sustainability.

It’s impossible not to recognize photographer Oliviero Toscani’s irreverent and visionary style. By immortalizing one of Andy Warhol’s muses, model Donna Jordan, bare-breasted on a sofa, he shaped the collective imagination in the 1970s. And we still associate this image with Mario Bellini’s history-making couch.

Fifty years after their initial creation, these icons of Italian style are evolving thanks to new design choices that make them even more comfortable and increasingly sustainable.

“I feel the pleasure of revisiting this family again“, says Bellini, “because it confirms to me that it is anything but aged; on the contrary, it is enjoying a thriving and promising second life, a rebirth done in a big way, done with enthusiasm, with breadth, with decorations and with the original flourishes. We have recovered its charm, its sumptuous floridity, its softness”.

1972: the social context in which the Le Bambole sofa collection was born

The ’60s and ’70s were fundamental years for Italian women, and women in general; they were key decades for their emancipation and their rights, in tune with great cultural and social movements that were spreading all over the world. The ‘70s saw the arrival of tangible initiatives for family law, crèches and advice centers, culminating in the successful referendums on divorce and abortion.
At the same time, cinema, music, art, fashion and communication began to present an image of an increasingly emancipated woman, master of her own appearance, who often used her body in total autonomy, as a weapon of seduction or as a claim to her own strength, as an instrument of conquest or as a declaration of independence.
It was in this context that Le Bambole sofa and their surprising communication campaign were born in 1972. These objects and images have become part of the collective imagination and the history of design.