100 Years of Bang & Olufsen and the Designs Still Look Like the Future

There are brands that survive a century, and then there are brands that deserve to. Bang & Olufsen, the Danish purveyor of audio objects so beautiful they ought to be insured alongside your jewellery, falls squarely into the latter category. Founded in 1925 in a modest attic in Struer, Denmark, by Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen — two engineering students with rather grand ambitions — the brand has spent the past hundred years making the rest of us feel that ordinary speakers are simply not an option. A Century of Sound (百年拂声), their centenary exhibition in Shanghai, made this case with considerable authority.

Spread across six immersive rooms at Shengjia Garden — a century-old estate on Hengshan Road — the exhibition traced the brand’s evolution from pioneering Danish upstart to global design powerhouse. What struck me most immediately was how shockingly contemporary their archive looked. Products designed three decades ago possessed the kind of quiet confidence that makes modern releases seem, by comparison, desperate for attention. That is the hallmark of genuine design intelligence: the refusal to chase a moment.

The Art Deco room

The Minimalism room

Each room told a different chapter. The Art Deco salon, richly appointed and atmospheric, proved that B&O’s sleek industrial vocabulary could hold its own against the era’s most ornate interiors — no small feat. But it was the Minimalism room that gave me pause. A gleaming stainless steel cube, spare and precise, it transported you directly to the 1990s — that decade of clean lines and cooler-than-thou restraint that is, of course, having its inevitable cultural revival. B&O didn’t just participate in that aesthetic; they helped author it. Standing inside that room, I found myself thinking: this is what it looks like when a brand is always five years ahead, for a hundred years running.

Then there was the Art of the A9 — a collaboration with five Chinese creatives that elevated B&O’s signature speaker into a canvas for cultural conversation: architect Zhang Yonghe, designer Li Ximi, singer Mavis Fan, tech creator He Tongxue and actor and brand ambassador Gong Jun. Each brought a distinct sensibility to the A9, but He’s contribution was the standout: a floral design that literally blossomed when heat was applied to its surface. It was the most quietly arresting thing I saw all evening.

From left: The Beolab 90 Alchemy Edition and the Beolab 90 Titan Edition

The final room required a certain composure. The centrepiece was the Beolab 90 Titan Edition — a decade on from the speaker’s original debut, this strictly limited centenary edition strips back the acoustic veils entirely to expose the hand-finished aluminium cabinet in all its raw, 65kg glory, with the tweeter housing machined from a single block of solid aluminium and every fastener individually polished and engraved with “1925”. Beside it stood the Beolab 90 Alchemy Edition, its walnut struts accented with 24-carat gold-plated nodes and its grilles handcrafted in bronze thread by specialist artisans. Together, they made the case that B&O has never really been in the business of making speakers. They make objects you fall in love with that happen to produce extraordinary sound.

The evening concluded at JZ Club, Shanghai’s most storied jazz destination, where a contemporary ensemble played a century of popular music in chronological sequence — from the jazz-age swagger of Putting on the Ritz all the way through to The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights. Leslie Cheung’s Monica brought the house down, as it has a way of doing, in any decade. The five collaborating artists then took to the stage for a panel on timelessness in design — a fitting close to an evening that had just made the argument rather convincingly on its own.

Some brands age. Others, like a perfectly engineered piece of Danish aluminium, simply endure.

This article was written by Pakkee Tan and was first seen on GRAZIA Singapore.

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