How the Togo Became the Hippest Sofa Again

Michel Ducaroy’s Imagination

With its many layers of folds, the surface of the Togo is often likened to “the scrunched face of a newborn” or “the wrinkles of a Shar-Pei puppy.” The most widely told origin story holds that Michel Ducaroy was struck one day by a folded toothpaste tube lying on the sink and immediately committed the shape to a sketch. The sofa’s exotic name has spawned its own lore: some say it derives from “toga,” the draped and folded garment of ancient Rome, while others claim Ducaroy spun a globe and named the sofa after the spot where his finger landed. The latter theory gained traction because his earlier designs had also borrowed place names—Safi, a city in Morocco, and Marsala, a port town in Sicily. Whether Ducaroy actually conceived the Togo with the help of a toothpaste tube or a globe, however, remains unclear. In one interview he said only that “the Togo looks like a tube of toothpaste folded back on itself like a stovepipe and closed at both ends.” The name, some say, was in fact the idea of the marketing director then handling the Togo’s publicity. What is certain is that the Togo’s form stirs the imagination vividly enough for all these stories to be accepted without much dispute.

When the Togo was released in 1973, however, the public’s response was very different from today’s. The sofa was first unveiled at the Salon des Arts Ménagers, the household arts fair in Paris, where it shared the floor with wooden furniture by the French designers Pierre Chapo and Marcel Gascoin. Confronted with the Togo’s radical form, some visitors asked whether the makers had “forgotten the base” or remarked that “the sofa looked unfinished,” and retailers were just as cold. Yet a few industry insiders looked closely—among them a juror for the Prix René Gabriel, an award given to innovative, democratic furniture judged on whether it offers high-quality design at a reasonable price. Recognized as exactly such a case, Michel Ducaroy received the prize in 1973, and the Togo went on to reach a wide public and find its success.

The year 1973 also marked Ligne Roset’s official launch as a brand, moving beyond its form as a family business: the brand name was settled, and the first Ligne Roset store opened its doors. The arrival of the Togo, the sofa that would come to define the house, became a crucial starting point in establishing the brand. As Ducaroy’s imagination opened this new chapter, he was appointed head of Ligne Roset’s design department. From 1973 to the present, the Togo has been produced continuously at a factory in Briord, a small village at the foot of the Jura Mountains in France—its signature folds still crafted by artisans entirely by hand.

Foam: The Arrival of a Versatile New Material

Even before the Togo, Michel Ducaroy had designed a series of sofas with Ligne Roset, all distinguished by seats set remarkably low to the floor. Beginning with the Adria collection—the first piece of furniture in Ligne Roset’s history made entirely of foam—he produced a succession of sofas filled with foam and fastened with buttons at the seat. Structurally, these designs shared enough of the Togo’s features to be considered its direct predecessors.

What allowed Ducaroy to exercise such imagination were the new materials and technical advances of the period: foam, thermoformed plastics, and synthetic wadding. Polyurethane foam had been developed in the 1950s, and by the 1970s the technology to build an entire sofa from foam was finally in place. Resistant to moisture and deformation, with an even distribution of tension, polyurethane foam could sustain a stable, comfortable sit over the long term. On this foundation came the Mah Jong sofa Hans Hopfer designed for Roche Bobois in 1971, followed by all-foam sofas from Pierre Paulin and a number of Italy’s radical designers.

Amid this exploration of new seating concepts—alongside the emergence of foam, quilting, and thermoformed plastics—Jean Roset and Michel Ducaroy spent the 1960s and ’70s developing new production techniques. The Togo was born of their continuous refinement of these methods in pursuit of a new model. Working with Recticel, a Belgian manufacturer of industrial foam products, they devised a structure combining three types of polyurethane foam that dramatically improved the durability of the all-foam sofa. Wrapping the foam in fabric or leather without any base opened the way to expandable modular configurations, made the sofa light enough to move with ease, and above all delivered a deeply comfortable sit. The Togo was a defining example of how a new material could rapidly transform sofa design altogether.

Against the currents that had prevailed into the 1950s—Bauhaus furniture built on steel frames, and the formal, conservative designs of cabinetmakers and craftsmen such as Alvar Aalto, Hans Wegner, and Finn Juhl—the Togo read as a challenge to the established order. Ligne Roset leaned into this reading, running an advertising poster with the slogan “La galerie des ancêtres et un siège Roset? Pourquoi pas” (“The ancestors’ portrait gallery and a Roset seat? Why not?”)—imprinting on the public a new kind of sofa far removed from traditional interiors.

The 1970s: The Rise of a Style

Behind the public’s embrace of the Togo’s singular design lay the social and cultural changes that had been building since the late 1960s. In 1968, France was shaken by massive student demonstrations and a general strike, an upheaval felt across society. Known as May 68, the movement gave vent to the frustrations of young people and workers with authoritarian social structures and the established order, and it led on to educational reform, sexual liberation, and a changed understanding of art’s social role. As the movement’s slogan “trouver la plage sous les pavés”—find the beach beneath the paving stones—suggests, this questioning of the existing order gave rise to new forms and expressions across art and design.

The Togo emerged from this zeitgeist. With its unconventional form, its use of new materials, and the public’s enthusiastic response, it can be seen as a condensation of the sensibility that shifted after 1968 and the creative energy of the 1970s. The current was felt beyond France as well. In 1960s Britain, Mods culture arose, embodied by a young generation in parkas riding scooters, while in Italy, designers such as Joe Colombo, Mario Bellini, Achille Castiglioni, and Gaetano Pesce shaped a new design discourse through experimental products that made full use of foam’s volume and flexibility.

The 1970s were an ideal decade for the Togo. Interiors filled with shaggy rugs, lava lamps, and furniture that held no fixed shape of its own, while fashion and popular culture expanded the range of expression as psychedelic art, Andy Warhol’s paintings, disco culture, and extreme silhouettes coexisted. Established standards of stability gave way to experimentation of every kind, and people began to accept, quite naturally, a way of living in loose postures—or buried in cushions.

The “conversation pit,” the sunken built-in seating Eero Saarinen proposed for the living room floor in 1957, had become a familiar feature of domestic interiors by the 1970s. It would eventually lead to “cocooning,” a term coined in the early 1980s for the retreat from the outside world into the security of one’s own private space. Composed of a variety of modules, the Togo established itself within this current as a design icon of 1970s France, beloved above all by musicians and artists, who embraced it as furniture that stood for a different attitude toward life—a soft place where one could curl up and linger.

Interiors of the 1970s thus grew more unpredictable and more personal, readily absorbing a new vocabulary beyond mid-century modernism. Available in covers ranging from leather to velvet to vividly colored fabrics, the Togo suited an age in which the desire for creative freedom was expanding through new tools and versatile materials. The free spirit of that decade’s counterculture continues to shape design and lifestyle to this day.

The Icon’s Triumphant Return

Celebrated for its avant-garde design from the moment it appeared in 1973, the Togo has long been regarded as a chair of real significance in design history. More than fifty years on, it is still in production and remains Ligne Roset’s signature bestseller. It is also the protagonist of a triumphant return, drawing renewed attention in the 2020s. The global pandemic that began in 2019 turned many people toward furniture and interiors, and as the Togo spread rapidly across social media through the spaces of influencers and celebrities, it found itself once again at the center of the trend.

It is rare for a single piece of furniture to generate such broad attention—a phenomenon reminiscent of the recurring cycles of icons in fashion and design. Think of the women’s suit of the 1920s, revived in Yves Saint Laurent’s collections of the 1960s, or the styles of the early 2000s resurfacing in the 2020s under the name Y2K. The attention surrounding the Togo has had its side effects, notably a proliferation of knockoffs, yet such repetition and variation can be understood as a continuous thread running through design history. And today’s environment—where images spread quickly through social media and access has never been easier—echoes the context in which the Togo was first released.

From the moment of the Togo’s launch, Ligne Roset pursued an ambitious promotional strategy with Jacques Séguéla, the leading advertising mind of the day, to fix the sofa’s image in consumers’ minds. The approach carried into the early 2000s, when the brand unveiled a special campaign for the Togo with Pierre Berville of the French agency Callegari Berville Grey. Pairing the work of renowned photographers with provocative copy, the campaign was widely acclaimed, winning the Grand Prix of the APPM (Association pour la Promotion de la Presse Magazine) in 2004 and playing an important role in planting the Togo in the public imagination. The sofa’s early success, too, was inseparable from this communication strategy.

Yet the Togo’s enduring appeal cannot be explained by exposure alone. The imagination, energy, and distinctive humor embodied in the sofa have drawn sympathy across generations, while its range of colors and materials offers choices bound to no single taste. Its modular structure and long-proven durability have underpinned its success as well, and continual variations—a children’s version, armrests added to certain models—have lent it flexibility across settings. The Togo sits as naturally in a stately old residence or a contemporary loft as in the trendiest space, accommodating styles from minimalist to industrial to bohemian. Appearing in the spaces of figures as varied as Lenny Kravitz, Bob Sinclar, Matt Sorum, Florence Foresti, and Marc Rebillet, this sofa—its soft, wrinkled silhouette embraced by two generations—has lost none of its charm to this day.

Togo Composition

The Togo collection comprises eight models in all. Depending on seat width, depth, and the presence of armrests, they range from straight to corner sofas, and each model can be used on its own or combined with other Togo sofas and footstools. Ligne Roset also offers ten composition sets, each a considered arrangement of the models. Light enough to move and recombine freely, each piece is fitted with a non-slip fabric underside that keeps it firmly in place.

Quilting

Creating the Togo’s signature wrinkled, quilted surface requires a generous amount of material. All cutting and sewing is still done by hand at the factory in France, where artisans devote considerable skill and time to achieving perfectly even, voluminous folds. It is here that the difference between a Togo and its counterfeits is most striking.

Buttons

To set each small, flat button in precisely the right position, a long needle is driven through the quilting to sew it in place. The buttons anchor the folds and the quilting securely to the foam.

Foam

A layered structure of three polyurethane foams of different densities allows the sofa to conform to the body while reinforcing support in the back and seat. High-density foam at the base provides stable support, a medium-density middle layer acts as a cushion, and the softest foam sits at the top. This structure completes the sofa’s comfort and extends its life—the most critical element of the Togo, which has no frame and is made entirely of foam.

Upholstery

The Togo comes in a wide range of upholstery options, from leather and canvas to velvet and printed fabrics. Beyond the sixty or so fabrics Ligne Roset offers, it can be freely customized with outside textiles, taking on a different character with each material.