What is Memphis design? Sottsass and the colour explosion of the 1980s

Memphis was a design group that Ettore Sottsass formed in Milan in December 1980 and that first exhibited in 1981. Its furniture and objects had strong colours, patterned plastic laminates and playful, geometric forms, and they deliberately broke modernism's rules of good taste. Memphis became a symbol of Postmodern design.

Facts

A name from a Dylan song

One evening in December 1980 Ettore Sottsass and a group of younger designers gathered in his flat in Milan. According to the story, Bob Dylan's song Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again was playing over and over, and they took Memphis as their name: both the city of the blues in the United States and the capital of ancient Egypt.

Sottsass was then over sixty and already well known, among other things for the Valentine typewriter for Olivetti in 1969. He had long been critical of austere, international modernism and had taken part in radical design in Italy in the 1970s. Read more under Italian radical design.

The 1981 exhibition

The group exhibited in Milan in September 1981, at the same time as the great furniture fair. The exhibition caused a sensation. The furniture looked like toys or architectural models: bookcases like robots, tables with legs of different colours and shapes, lamps that resembled fish or spaceships.

Best known is Sottsass's bookcase Carlton, a kind of totem pole or figure with arms in plastic laminate in several colours and patterns. It works as a bookcase, but the shelves slope and leave little room for books. Form matters more than function, and that was the point.

Materials and patterns

Memphis liked to use cheap materials in an expensive context. Plastic laminate, otherwise found on kitchen worktops and in cafés, covered exclusive furniture, often with printed patterns such as Sottsass's Bacterio or Nathalie Du Pasquier's colourful surfaces. Glass, metal, neon tubes and terrazzo were mixed freely.

The colours were strong and often discordant: pink against green, yellow against black. The forms were built of circles, triangles, zigzags and cubes put together in unexpected ways. Everything that modernism had called tasteless became a deliberate choice here.

Postmodern design

Memphis was design's counterpart to Postmodern architecture, and several architects, such as Michael Graves and Hans Hollein, designed for the group. The Japanese Shiro Kuramata contributed poetic objects in glass and acrylic. Read more about the period under Postmodernism and Memphis in Italy.

The same playful freedom can be seen in other objects of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Philippe Starck's lemon squeezer Juicy Salif, a spider-like sculpture that barely works as a squeezer but became one of the best-known design icons of the time.

The end and the comeback

Sottsass left the group in 1985, and in 1987 it was dissolved. By then it had already had great influence on fashion, graphic design, television and advertising. The style became so widespread that it was soon perceived as typical of the 1980s, and therefore out of date.

In the 2010s interest returned. Designers and fashion houses borrowed the colours and patterns, and when the musician David Bowie's large Memphis collection was sold at auction in 2016 it attracted much attention. Compare with the calmer Scandinavian design to see how different the answers to the question of good form can be.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who founded the Memphis Group?