The Salivasofa is a 1972 lips sofa by Salvador Dalí, designed for Catalan architect Oscar Tusquets. Its glossy red mouth, parted and waiting, now produced by BD Barcelona in polyethylene. It descends from a long history of Dalí turning mouths into couches, beginning with his 1938 Mae West Lips Sofa. He built that one for British patron Edward James’s Surrealist country house in West Sussex. The Salivasofa is the same provocation, stripped of felt and fringe, sealed in plastic.

Dalí is having a week — the V&A’s Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art opens Saturday with his Skeleton Dress and Lobster Telephone. But the lips sofa has always lived outside the museum. Versions of it show up in Diane von Furstenberg’s Manhattan living room, in Christian Dior’s château, in Studio 65’s Gufram knockoff. Dalí never intended it to be sat on. Everyone sits on it anyway.