Gallery · Room 16 · Milan, 1980–1988
Memphis
A Milan design group that threw out good taste: squiggles, laminates and clashing color.
Wall text
Memphis began in December 1980, when Ettore Sottsass met younger architects including Martine Bedin, Aldo Cibic, Michele De Lucchi, Matteo Thun and Marco Zanini at his apartment in Milan. They named the group after a Bob Dylan song that kept sticking on the record player.
Their furniture used cheap plastic laminates printed with kitsch patterns, put clashing colors side by side, and turned storage into totems like Sottsass's Carlton room divider. They wanted to break free of smart but soulless good taste. At the debut in Milan on 18 September 1981, a couple of thousand people crowded in.
Sottsass left in 1985 and the group broke up in 1988, but Memphis shaped the look of the 1980s, and it returns whenever design gets too polite.