Dali’s Mae West Lips Sofa is currently on view at the Brighton and Hove Museum in southern England, but you’re not allowed to sit on it.

Fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli may have been among the last to do so, when Dali included the sofa in his refurbishment plans for her salon on the Place Vendome in Paris in 1937.

Schiaparelli, who created clothes for Mae West and also collaborated with Leonor Fini, Jean Cocteau and Alberto Giacometti, utilised Dali several times.

He inspired printed fabrics for her collections, in which the pattern represents the torn flesh of animals, and made her a skeleton dress, a pink belt with lips for a buckle, a hat like an upside-down shoe, another hat shaped like a giant lamb chop and a lobster-print frock that was worn by the Duchess of Windsor for a pre-wedding portrait for Vogue by photographer Cecil Beaton.

The Duchess seemed unaware that the lobster was positioned almost as a fig leaf or a long arm reaching up to the precise part of her anatomy that had caused the abdication crisis.

Both of the Dali-Schiaparelli hats were worn by the Franco-American editor of the French Harper’s Bazaar Daisy Fellowes, one of Elsa’s best clients. Fellowes owned a Cartier pink diamond called the Ram’s Head that inspired the colour of the box of Schiaparelli’s first perfume, Shocking, packaging designed by Leonor Fini and the bottle in the shape of a woman’s torso, supposedly based on Mae West’s tailor’s dummy.

This telephone-dial cosmetics compact that Dali designed for Schiaparelli in 1935 sold for nearly $13,000 at a Sotheby’s fashion auction in 1997. It’s made of golden bronze with black enamel.

With Christian Dior in 1950, Dali created a “Costume for the Year 2045″.

There’s much more about Dalinean furniture and other decorative gear in this post.

“Night and Day Clothes”, from 1936

“A chair,” Dali once declared, “can even be used for sitting on, but with just one condition: that we be uncomfortably seated.” He personally preferred a cushiony throne, of course.

He wasn’t being merely sadistic, or was he?

“The surrealist object is one that is absolutely useless from a practical and rational point of view,” he wrote in 1931, “and is created wholly for the purpose of materialising in a fetishistic way, with the maximum of tangible reality, ideas and fantasies that have a delirious character.”

But the pain-as-pleasure philosophy was applied quite unevenly when the maestro applied himself to decor for the home and the body. As well as furniture, he created shoes, hats, purses, jewellery of all kinds, wristwatches and bottles for perfume, wine and whiskey, all of them well designed and covetably luxurious. His collaborations with Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and others are noted elsewhere on this site.

“Coming Back: Design for a Beach Two-piece”, left, and “Dalinean Empire: Design for a Summer Cocktail Dress”, both from 1965.

In terms of things you can sit on, comfortably or not, nothing of Dali’s is nearly as famous as his Mae West Lips sofa from 1936, a recent variation of which is seen here. But his sporadic creations, right up to the 1970s, show no less whimsy and invention. In fact, most of what came later was envisioned strictly for the canvas, not the living room, and yet they became three-dimensional realities.

Many of the pieces seen here are sold by the firms BD Barcelona in Spain and Beverly Hills-based Gibraltar Furniture. Needless to say, none is cheap.

Made with polished, lacquered, cast-brass legs, the Leda Low Table and its accompanying armchair were first conceived in 1937, straight out of Dali’s painting “Woman with a Head of Roses” from two years earlier. The table was selling for nearly $23,000 in 2008 (Carrara marble egg not necessarily included).

Here’s a detail of the chair’s arm, along with Dali’s Rhinoceros Door Handle, again from 1937.

The Vis a Vis Conversation Bench was commanding $44,000. It’s based on a drawing Dali did, also in 1937, for Jean-Michel Frank.

Below, “Le Soulier de Gala”, also called “The Pubic Hair of the Virgin”, “Scatalogical Object Functioning Symbolically” and just plain “The Surrealist Shoe”, reinstates Dali’s festishistic approach to wearables — make them unwearable.

Conceived in 1931, made a reality by Max Clarac-Sérou in 1975, with just eight copies, and sold by Sotheby’s New York in 2008 for around a quarter of a million dollars, this assemblage was afforded a matter-of-fact description by Dali himself:

“A woman’s shoe, inside of which a glass of warm milk has been placed, in the centre of a soft paste in the colour of excrement. The mechanism consists of the dipping in the milk of a sugar lump, on which there is a drawing of a shoe, so that the dissolving of the sugar, and consequently the image of the shoe, may be observed.”

Not exactly ideal for the ballroom. Below, “Dancing Shoes”.

For Omega, the watch brand, Dali painted a 1953 magazine cover titled “The Hour of the Poets”.

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Below, “Bird in Hand”, a gold- and silver-plated copper compact for lipstick and face powder, made in 1952, sold for about $25,000 in 2004; and the “Ruby Lips” brooch from 1949.

He designed a label for the 1958 Chateau Mouton Rothschild and, seen here, for an Osborne superior brandy in the 1960s and, in the early ’70s, for a three-bottle set of Rosso Antico from Italy and a Brut Rosado Cava, the “pink champagne” he served guests in Port Lligat. These photos come courtesy of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group.

The “nose-lips” bottle for Factice perfume was developed for a promotion in about 1960, but there was a fragrance called “Dali” too. Beside it is a magazine ad for a scent called Rock’n’Roll, definitely Dionysian — and Dalinean as well. The odd story of that aroma is in this post.

Handbags and other apparel are still being made with the maestro’s own 1972 “Dali-Design” by the Spanish company Art & Mode Surreal Distributions SL, which in fact shares premises with the Dali Foundation in Figueras.

Dali wanted a prestige brand in his name and devised the “Toile Daligram” to mark its products, which he intended to give to friends, patrons and “international personalities”.

The Daligram resembles Louis Vuitton’s monogram, but uses his adopted symbols, such as the fleur de lis and crown, along with his and Gala’s initials.

After its establishment in 2005, Arts & Mode partnered with Oscar Tusquets, who it describes as a Dali “disciple and close friend”, to create new pieces.

Dali’s various obsessions pop up in the designs — a loaf of bread, a grand piano, ants, eggs. One purse is called the Carolineta, after the cousin he was fond of in his youth, who’s appeared in several of his paintings.

Meanwhile at the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, Nigel Simmins once showed off this original Dali-designed handbag from the late ’60s or early ’70s with milkdrop crown clasp.

And another member, Deborah Larsen, has shared her “Dalinian passion” for making purses inspired by his art.

She embellishes vintage ladies’ evening bags with gemstones and laminated “Dalinian charms of every nature” — chromium cards, book prints, postcards and other objects that can be removed and used as earrings. A sample is seen here along with a photo of Deb costumed for a look-alike contest at the Dali Museum in Florida, where she works as a docent.

And finally, the man, his cat and his handbag … and a very comfortable chair.

Here’s the live link for the BBC interviews page mentioned above.

“Apotheosis of Homer” from 1944-45, now at the Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst in Munich (click for a large image), has been read as a dismissal of myth as an accurate means of assessing human existence.

More precisely, Dali — whose father read him Greek mythology as a child — may be depicting in the form of a crumbling statue of Homer and temple of the oracle the belief that art and reason are superior means of reaching the truth.

The horse, possibly Pegasus, is flinging off riders who are attempting to reach the stars. The naked woman, an image repeated in 1944’s “One Second Before Awakening from a Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate”, may merely suggest a dreamer.