Bang & Olufsen in pop culture

2025 marks the 100th anniversary of Bang & Olufsen, the world’s most iconic audio brand. Despite its longevity, the Danish company started life humbly in 1925, when two young engineers named Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen began making radios out of the Olufsen family attic. Though the beginnings were small, the duo’s original mission statement – “A never-failing will to create only the best” – meant that, over the course of a century, Bang & Olufsen would cement itself as popular culture’s favourite audio brand, and it would do so through an unfettered commitment to innovative design.

Despite early victories in the late 1920s, when the pair introduced their first mass-produced radio, by 1934 the famed furniture designer Ole Wanscher criticised the radios of the day for their old-fashioned, wooden designs. This led Bang and Olufsen to create the Hyperbo 5 RG Steel radio, whose black and metallic shell was inspired by Bang’s own Marcel Breuer desk chair, another titan of interior design. A similar – and arguably even more transformative – design turning point came 20 years later, when another celebrated designer, Poul Henningsen, wrote in a review that “it is an insult to people who value modern furniture to force them to buy these monstrosities to enjoy the considerable cultural asset embodied by the radio.”

By the time Henningsen wrote this in 1954, Olufsen had already passed away, and the company was in the hands of chief engineer W. L Vindeløv, who begrudgingly took on Henningsen’s point. From then, Vindeløv turned Bang & Olufsen into the pop cultural behemoth we know today, tapping into Denmark’s young design talent to collaborate on products for the brand. Ib Fabiansen began working with B&O in 1959, Jacob Jensen in 1954 – but it was Clive Lewis’s appointment in 1965 that changed the trajectory of the brand.

Pin It — Beosound 9000Courtesy of Bang & Olufsen

Among the many icons that the British designer is credited with creating, the Beosound 9000 is arguably the most recognisable, a 6-disc CD player that was launched in 1996. Legend goes that, while walking past a music shop in London, Lewis saw six CD cases lined up next to each other in the window, which gave him the idea for the multi-disc design that let listeners rapidly switch between different albums. Because of the CD player’s one-of-a-kind design, the Beosound 9000 infiltrated popular culture, showing up in films like The Big Lebowski and About a Boy, television shows like Sex and the City, and countless music videos, too.

In 1980, Lewis was made Bang & Olufsen’s chief designer, and continued to tirelessly produce some of the company’s most iconic designs until his death in 2011. Among these were the long and sleek Beocom 2 telephone, the conical Beosound 2 speaker and the futuristic Beolab 5 speaker, to name a few. Below, we chart Lewis’s iconic Bang & Olufsen designs that permeated pop culture from the 90s to now, spotted across film, television and a Will Smith music video.