PurplePrice Mag · · 3 min read
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Memphis is the group of designers and architects that, in the early 1980s, revolutionised design with brightly coloured furniture, geometric shapes and an irony never seen before. It is the most famous face of Postmodernism and one of the best-known chapters of Italian design.
A December evening
On the evening of 11 December 1980 Ettore Sottsass, then sixty-three, invited a few young designer friends to the living room of his home in Milan: Martine Bedin, Aldo Cibic, Michele De Lucchi, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Matteo Thun and George Sowden. They wanted to invent a new way of designing, far from the rules of functionalist design. While a Bob Dylan record kept playing Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, the group chose its name: Memphis, the Tennessee city where Elvis Presley was born, but also the ancient capital of Egypt. A deliberately ambiguous name, between pop culture and history.
Sottsass and De Lucchi came from Studio Alchimia and Radical design, but with Memphis they wanted something different: not one-off protest pieces, but real objects to be produced and sold. The group was soon joined by designers and architects from all over the world, including Andrea Branzi, the Japanese Shiro Kuramata, the American Peter Shire, Marco Zanini, Masanori Umeda, the Spaniard Javier Mariscal, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein and Arata Isozaki.
The 1981 exhibition
On 19 September 1981 the Arc '74 gallery in Milan showed 55 pieces of furniture, lamps and ceramics. The opening drew a crowd, and in the following months hundreds of newspapers around the world wrote about Memphis. The most famous pieces immediately became icons:
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- Sottsass's Carlton bookcase (1981), an almost human figure in coloured laminate that also works as a room divider;
- Sottsass's Tahiti lamp (1981), shaped like a stylised bird;
- Martine Bedin's Super lamp (1981), a semicircle on four wheels to be pulled along like a little dog;
- Peter Shire's Bel Air armchair (1982), with its shark-fin back, a tribute to surfing California;
- Michele De Lucchi's First chair (1983), as light as a Calder sculpture.
Laminates, patterns and "bad taste"
The great novelty of Memphis was its materials. Plastic laminate by Abet Laminati, until then used for bar counters and cheap kitchens, was printed with patterns drawn by the designers themselves, such as Sottsass's Bacterio motif, and combined with precious materials such as burr walnut. Bright colours, zigzags, dots and splashes, asymmetrical shapes: everything that the "good taste" of modern design forbade. Not surprisingly, critics either loved it or hated it. The British designer Terence Conran dismissed it as "a joke", while the young Jasper Morrison recalled feeling "freed" by its total rule-breaking.
The end and the legacy
"Strong ideas are short-lived," said Sottsass, who left Memphis in 1985 to concentrate on his own firm, Sottsass Associati. The group disbanded in 1987. But the Memphis style spread through the 1980s and 1990s: television, graphics, fashion, video games, shops. Its collectors included Karl Lagerfeld and David Bowie, whose collection was auctioned by Sotheby's in 2016. The prototype of the Super lamp is now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Memphis is not just history: the brand still exists and continues to produce the original 1980s pieces in small series. Since the 2010s Memphis colours and shapes have come back into fashion in clothing, graphics and interiors.
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