In a watercolour, he turned her blonde curls into portières, her eyes into paintings, her nose into a fireplace, and her lips into a divan. The last was a furnishing so provocative that British arts patron Edward James requested a three-dimensional version.
![DKO Alexander St](https://livingedge.com.au/on/demandware.static/-/Library-Sites-shared_library/default/dw19ae4cae/blog-post/DaliLips_0000_1920x1080.jpg)
Dalí set to the task. The client deemed his first try, wrapped in pink satin, “too showy.” James preferred the next two, realized in 1938 by London decorators Green & Abbott in red and green felt with black fringe. The pair—one is at the V&A; the other failed to sell at Christie’s in June—were made for Monkton House in West Sussex, a classical Edwin Lutyens mansion that James recast as a Surrealist fantasia.
James commissioned five Dalí lips sofas, but there’s no reliable count of the spin-offs, vetted and otherwise. A Pop icon decades later, the seat was re-envisioned in 1970 by Italian radical firm Studio 65, which produced a polyurethane riff with Gufram. Two years later, Dalí collaborated with Catalan architect Oscar Tusquets on another example in polyethylene, which BD Barcelona began producing in 2004.
![DKO Alexander St](https://livingedge.com.au/on/demandware.static/-/Library-Sites-shared_library/default/dw3adb1eb1/blog-post/DaliLips_0000.jpg)