This year has seen a wealth of new products from B&B Italia, with contributions across the company’s various portfolios from the likes of Antonio Citterio, Jean-Marie Massaud, David Chipperfield, Gabriele & Oscar Buratti and Naoto Fukasawa. 2009 is also the anniversary of the Up series of anthropomorphic seats, notably the Up 5_Up6, which came about in 1969 through the collaboration of C&B Italia (the company from which B&B Italia evolved) and Gaetano Pesce.

Seven seats arose out of the Up series, which Pesce describes as ‘telling a personal story about the notion of women’, and it was updated by B&B Italia in 2000 through the use of high-performance materials. The chairs, made in polyurethane foam and upholstered in stretch fabric, were initially vacuum packed, with a reduction in volume of 90 per cent. These days, vacuum packing has been replaced by further research on materials, making it possible to use longer lasting elements.

A regular feature in design collections and displayed in international museums across the world, including Citterio’s latest exhibition at the Museum of Design at the Milan Triennale, the 40th anniversary of this pop-culture piece of furniture has been given a silvery birthday suit, personalised with a serial number.