I Own Gemma’s Rare Vintage Makeup Vanity From Severance
She—yes, she—is my prized possession and now she is a star.
Watching episode 7 of Severance was essentially an exercise in how long I could hold a frown. But then at nine minutes and seventeen seconds in, I smiled for the first and only time the entire episode. I jumped up and screamed at the screen while grinning and grabbing at my boyfriend’s shoulder, “SHE OWNS A DILLY DALLY!”
To most, this sentence would mean nothing. But if you are chronically online, and maybe one of the 3 million (!!!) people who saw the TikTok video of my Luigi Massoni Dilly Dally makeup vanity from the 1960s, you’d understand.
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Luigi Massoni (I keep almost typing out Luigi Mangioni, both Italian icons) was a furniture designer who in 1969 designed a makeup vanity for Poltrona Frau. It was composed of two pieces, an armchair and a table with space for vanities, complete with a round mirror.
What made it perfect in my eyes was the fact that the chair so satisfyingly tucks under the table. It is like the world’s most girly puzzle. Massoni named it “Dilly Dally,” because he viewed that as something women did and thus the perfect name for a furniture item designed specifically with them in mind. And while perhaps that phrase has a negative connotation, I don’t think it should.
What is a makeup vanity if not a place to dilly dally, spending an hour trying on multiple different kinds of eye glitter or attempting to understand the subtle differences between all of your nearly identical shades of lip liner. That isn’t wasting time. That’s luxuriating in the mundane moments that make life worth living. I don’t feel shame for dilly dallying. I aspire to dilly dally (at my Dilly Dally).
“If you push the mirror down it can also be used as a desk”: This is a sentence that is a fact but also part of the very sound argument I used to convince my boyfriend Rafe that it was worth the $3,000 I found it for online, back in 2019. “I need this” did not really move him in the way I was hoping initially.
He thought it was too much for a makeup vanity. I told him it might as well be the only makeup vanity in the world. He seemed unconvinced. Then I told him it was basically two items for the price of one. He started to listen. I of course would mostly benefit from this purchase, but I emphasized how cute I would look applying blusher1 sitting on the plush cushion, and then setting the mirror shut to create a desk where I could type out an article for whatever fashion magazine I was working for at the time on my laptop. He seemed moved by that vision. How could he not be? We split the purchase and it has now gone viral multiple times on multiple platforms, elicited comments like “I think about this vanity every day that I am alive” and threats of robbery. It now retails for upwards of $12,000, and is proof that I am always right and should be given free range to purchase whatever I deem fit.
When people walk into our apartment and see it they say, “There she is”, like this makeup vanity is my newborn. But now she just starred in Severance and I am so proud of her.
I can’t remember the last time I ever saw a piece of furniture I’ve owned in a TV show or a film. It’s happened a couple of times with vintage clothing, but never vintage furniture. And did I expect the piece of furniture I own to be used as set dressing for a woman’s underground enclosure, where she is preparing to get dressed to go to a room where her outside memory is severed and she is an innie reliving the experience of going to the dentist again and again and again and again for all eternity? Nope!
And while I mourned for Gemma the entire episode, I hope the Dilly Dally at least gives her the same kind of joy it brings me every morning when I look at—and that she can somehow find a way to hit Mr. Milchick over the head with it next time he comes down to the testing floor.
My new preferred way to refer to blush. Thank you Aimee Lou Wood.
More from Cult Classic on Severance:
I think the two concrete hanging shelves repurposed as flower pots counters your “always correct” narrative
I love your vanity, but mangioni is NOT an icon nor does he represent the overall Italian-American community.