Architect, designer and theorist Alessandro Mendini thought of celebrating the significance of lipstick’s fetish when he created the Monument to lipstick for Deborah, the well-known Italian brand of cosmetics, as part of the annual interior design event, the Salone del Mobile, held in the cloisters of the State University. Hoisted on a wooden pedestal, a giant lipstick, with its vermilion paste as a kind of banner, and with its case decorated with large naif flowers, soared upward in the old courtyard, a symbolic and eloquent eulogy to frivolity. By creating a magnified model of lipstick, characterized by a fairytale aesthetic, Alessandro Mendini has given a playful image back to fetish, usually associated with turbid magic rituals, offering an explicit invitation to paint one’s lips ruby red.