Few design movements have had a stranger life than Memphis. It lasted only a handful of years in early 1980s Milan, it was mocked as much as it was praised, and yet its squiggles, clashing colors and plastic laminate keep coming back: on runways, in album art, on sneakers and in the homes of people who would never call themselves design collectors. If you have ever seen a bookcase that looks like a robot or a lamp that looks like a stack of toys, you have seen Memphis, or something that wants to be it.
Here is what Memphis actually was, the pieces that define it, and how to tell the real thing from the endless imitations.
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How Memphis started
The story begins on the evening of 11 December 1980, in the Milan living room of Ettore Sottsass. Sottsass was already in his sixties and famous, having designed the Olivetti Valentine typewriter and spent years in Italy's radical design scene. That night he gathered a group of young designers and architects: Martine Bedin, Aldo Cibic, Michele De Lucchi, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Matteo Thun and George J. Sowden. According to the official history kept by Memphis Milano, Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" was playing, and the group took its name from the song. It stuck, helped by the fact that it pointed two ways at once: to Memphis, Tennessee, the home of Elvis and the blues, and to the capital of ancient Egypt.
The group soon grew to include Andrea Branzi, Shiro Kuramata, Marco Zanini, Peter Shire, Gerard Taylor and Masanori Umeda, along with architects such as Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki and the firm Arquitectonica, plus the Spanish designer Javier Mariscal. It was international from the start, which is one reason the look traveled so fast.
The 1981 debut
Memphis showed its first collection on 19 September 1981 at the Arc '74 gallery in Milan, during the Salone del Mobile furniture fair. There were 55 pieces, including furniture, lamps and ceramic objects, and the reaction was immediate: within three months the collection had appeared in more than 400 magazines and newspapers around the world. For a scene that had spent decades worshipping clean lines and restraint, it was a shock.
What makes something Memphis
Sowden put it best: "There is no Memphis style. Memphis is an attitude." The attitude was a rejection of good taste as the design establishment defined it. Where modernism said form follows function, Memphis said a cabinet could also be a joke, a totem or a piece of pop art. A few traits show up again and again:
- Plastic laminate as a hero material. Memphis worked with the Italian manufacturer Abet Laminati on decorative laminates patterned by the designers themselves, taking a wipe-clean surface associated with kitchen counters and diner tables and putting it on gallery furniture.
- Contrasting materials. Cheap laminate sat right next to precious materials such as briar wood, and surface pattern became the main event rather than an afterthought.
- Clashing color. Primary colors, pastels, black and white, often all on one object.
- Toy-like geometry. Cylinders, cones, spheres and zigzags assembled as if by a child with a building set, though the balance is carefully engineered.
- Cultural references. Hollywood, surf culture, Art Deco, Egypt, India and space travel all turn up in the names and shapes.
The icons
These are the pieces that come up whenever Memphis does, all still listed in the official catalog with their original design dates:
- Carlton (Ettore Sottsass, 1981). A bookcase and room divider nearly two meters tall and wide, with shelves angling off a central column like arms. Memphis calls it "the absolute Memphis icon", and it is the piece most people picture.
- Casablanca (Ettore Sottsass, 1981). A laminate cabinet 221 centimeters tall with angled arms, proof that ornament was back after years of functional minimalism.
- Super (Martine Bedin, 1981). A semicircular lamp on four rubber wheels, topped with six colored bulbs. Bedin pictured it being pulled around the house like a dog on a leash.
- Tawaraya Ring (Masanori Umeda, 1981). A domestic boxing ring built on the proportions of tatami mats, meant as a ring "for intellectual combat". The famous photo of the Memphis designers piled into it is the movement's group portrait.
- Plaza (Michael Graves, 1981). A dressing table named after New York's Plaza Hotel, an "indoor skyscraper" with an Art Deco skyline and Hollywood star lights.
- Kristall (Michele De Lucchi, 1981). A small table whose spindly legs nod to the Apollo 11 lunar module.
- Ashoka (Ettore Sottsass, 1981). A table lamp named after an emperor of India's Maurya Empire, a wobbly-looking stack of shapes that is in fact perfectly symmetrical.
- Bel Air (Peter Shire, 1982). An armchair with a shark fin back, a tribute to California surf culture by the group's Los Angeles member.
Why it ended, and why it didn't
Memphis was never meant to last. Sottsass left in 1985, saying that strong ideas are short-lived, and the group wound down a couple of years later. But the look had already escaped into the wider culture. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s it showed up on television sets, in shopping malls and on school supplies, often in watered-down form. Karl Lagerfeld collected it, and David Bowie was a passionate collector who described the jolt of walking into a room with a Memphis cabinet in it.
The revival never really stopped. Fashion houses keep borrowing the patterns, graphic designers keep reaching for the squiggle, and today's playful object makers owe it a debt. The bright, modular electronics in our guide to every Teenage Engineering product come from the same instinct to make serious tools look fun, and the sculptural hi-fi of the Ruka Studio TD-1 vertical turntable treats an audio component as a statement object, very much in the Memphis spirit. Compare that with the cool restraint of the Bang & Olufsen Beosystem 3000c and you can see the argument Memphis started is still going on.
How to buy Memphis
The good news is that Memphis was never just a museum story. Memphis Milano still produces the original designs in Italy, from Carlton and Casablanca to the lamps and ceramics, using the same laminate patterns. Buying from the company or its authorized dealers is the only way to get a new piece made to the original specification, and it is worth knowing that vintage 1980s examples command collector prices at auction. Be wary of anything sold as "Memphis style": the term covers everything from honest homages to cheap knockoffs.
If a gallery piece is not in the budget, start with the books. Ettore Sottsass and the Poetry of Things by Deyan Sudjic is a well-illustrated introduction to the man behind the movement. More is More: Memphis, Maximalism, and New Wave Design by Claire Bingham traces the look through to today's designers, and Postmodern Design Complete by Judith Gura puts Memphis in the context of the wider postmodern moment.
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