For over two decades, the Vitra Design Museum has been making miniature replicas of milestones in furniture design. The Miniatures Collection encapsulates the entire history of industrial furniture design - moving from Historicism and Art Nouveau to the New Objectivity of Bauhaus and Radical Design, and from Postmodernism all the way up to the present day. Exactly one sixth of the size of the historical originals, the chairs are all true to scale and precisely recreate the smallest details of construction, material and color. The high standard of authenticity even extends to the natural grain of the wood, the reproduction of screws and the elaborate handicraft techniques involved. This has made the miniatures into popular collector's items as well as ideal illustrative material for universities, design schools and architects.

La Mamma (Donna) is completely in tune with the spirit of Pop Art and the Gaetano Pesce fondness for anthropomorphic shapes. The chair was actually designed to resemble a prehistoric, female fertility figure, with a ball attached to symbolize captivity. The unconventional nature of the shape also applies to the construction and marketing of the chair which was one of a series of six.

Together they succeeded in marking a radical break from traditional upholstery production thanks to the technology developed by C&B Italia for creating oversized foam parts. Donna consists of a molded monoblock of foam without any supporting structure since the foam rubber is dense and free-standing. First a finished piece of furniture covered with elastic nylon jersey is reduced in a vacuum chamber to about 10% of its normal volume and is then wrapped in airtight foil. The customer can easily transport the otherwise unwieldy piece single-handedly. After removal of the wrapper at the destination, the chair slowly recovers its original shape without outside help as air seeps back into the capillaries of the polyurethane foam.

Each Vitra miniature is true to the original in construction and materials, and reduced in size on a scale of 1:6. Each miniature is packaged in a wooden box, accompanied by an informational booklet. Production notes: Each of the delicate objects are made by hand; on average, each miniature requires five hours of careful manual work. Ongoing quality control ensures that every miniature corresponds to its larger original in terms of finishing, details and materials.