Designed in 1970 by Ettore Sottsass, the $12,000 Ultrafragola mirror remains one of the most buzzworthy home decor items for luxury living. Blame selfie culture.
You’ve seen the wavy pink mirror in your feed – the Ultrafragola (“ultimate strawberry”), glowing from the inside with LED lights, vaguely labia-like, and almost always the frame of a selfie with a few thousand likes. Lena Dunham has one of the mirrors. So do Frank Ocean, Bella Hadid, and Sophia Amoruso. A selfie in the $12,000 mirror has become as “Instagram” as latte art.
History of the Ultrafragola Mirror
The Ultrafragola was designed in 1970, before Instagram was even a twinkle in Kevin Systrom’s eye. It was the creation of Ettore Sotsass, the Italian architect who went on to establish the Memphis Group -- the design and architecture collective that inspired a movement away from what was traditionally considered “in good taste” and toward dramatic color, shape, and patterns like stripes and squiggles. Memphis design, simply characterized and amplified by aesthetic archetypes of the '80s and early '90s (think Saved By The Bell), was groundbreaking, polarizing, and undeniably cool in its beginning.