A versatile artist with a thousand interests, including photography, painting, ceramics, writing, publishing, Ettore Sottsass Jr. has been able to reach into every field with his work, but he is mainly known for being a brilliant architect and designer. In Milan, he was one of the founders of the Memphis Group, a real space for experimenting with design projects as "positive propositional gestures, not critical ones, as was the case with radical and conceptual poetics" (Barbara Radice, 1981). Inside Memphis, design is pure emotion. Here the Carlton bookcase was born: a totem with a mysterious yet playful appearance, a sculpture, an object to be observed before being used. Not only a visionary artist, but also an intellectual, traveller and writer. With his first wife, the writer and translator Fernanda Pivano and Allen Ginsberg, writer of the Beat Generation, he founded Pianeta Fresco, a magazine in which he combined his interests in Eastern spirituality and Western materiality.

According to Sottsass, design must always include the human being who is at the centre of any discussion related to form and space: design is an instrument of social criticism, it is an ethical choice, a political gesture. If industry projects objects intended to foment a consumerist system, in Sottsass's thinking a designer has the duty to think design ethically by reflecting on private and public space. Design is a medium to say something about life and society, something that comes close to rituals, habits, the real life of people. Objects serve a function, but aesthetically they impose themselves in space with their colours and shapes, dialoguing with those who live in the environment.

With this idea Sottsass presented at the 1970 Eurodomus in Milan the furniture collection for the bedroom called Mobili Grigi. Among the items presented, only the Ultrafragola mirror-lamp was produced by Poltronova, while the others only existed in very few examples. The peculiarity of the mirror is that it has the iconic sinuous shape of a (woman's) hair, and somehow evokes the "rounded and swollen (forever) forms of female origin perhaps or - if you like - of religious origin (which is the same thing)", as Sottsass himself stated during the presentation. Like works by great artists before him, the object did not arouse appreciation, so much so that it led to an interruption of the collaboration between the artist and the manufacturer.

A further peculiarity of the Grey Furniture also lies in the material they are made of. It is fibreglass, a material used to make boat hulls, rather unusual in the field of design.

History, however, seems to have proved that the artist's intuition was right and, with hindsight, can be considered a forerunner of a trend and an approach that was about 40 years ahead of its time. The mirror is back in the limelight thanks to trends that, also thanks to social media, allow us to rediscover design jewels of the past and launch them on the market as new must-have objects. Sottsass, in fact, had condensed in his art all that he had seen and assimilated in his travels. From India, spirituality and symbolism and from America, the pop world of advertising and seriality. The provocation of Grey Furniture with the Ultrafragola therefore became a criticism of modernism, of the prevailing rationalism of those years that denied colours, which, instead, Sottsass used with exuberance and style.