Lady Chair

Designed over 60 years ago, Marco Zanuso’s Lady Chair is a classic example of how mate­ri­als and tech­nol­ogy can be used to engen­der new aesthet­ics. It all began in the late 1940s when Pirelli – the vener­a­ble Italian manu­fac­turer known the world over for its rubber prod­ucts – invited Marco Zanuso to exper­i­ment with home furnish­ings appli­ca­tions for its inno­v­a­tive foam rubber.

The Lady chair was one of those early results that not only provided the cata­lyst for Pirelli to estab­lish Arflex as its furni­ture divi­sion but captured the imag­i­na­tions of the judges at the pres­ti­gious 1951 Milan Trien­nale by winning the top prize. Arflex contin­u­ously produced the Lady lounge chair through 2013; in 2015, Cassina now has the chair as part of its I Maestri Collec­tion. The Lady chair is included in the perma­nent collec­tions of museums world­wide. It remains one of the land­mark pieces asso­ci­ated with the mate­ri­als and tech­ni­cal exper­i­men­ta­tion that under­scores the aesthet­ics of midcentury modernism.