A looping Bob Dylan record named the loudest design group of the 1980s
On the night of December 6, 1980, Ettore Sottsass gathered young designers to plot an escape from Modernism while a Bob Dylan record kept looping. They took its word Memphis as their name, and their loud laminate furniture went on to colour a decade of malls, game shows and skate graphics.
Also known as Memphis Milano, the collective ran from 1980 to 1987 and turned out furniture, lamps, textiles, rugs, ceramics, glass and metalwork. Three months after that first meeting, members came back with more than a hundred drawings. The name had a deliberate double meaning: a city in Tennessee that was itself named after an ancient Egyptian capital, a vagueness the group felt suited its slippery ideas.
Their signature materials were cheap plastic laminate and terrazzo, worked into lopsided shapes with abstract, brightly coloured patterns. The best-known piece, the Carlton room divider, is a totem-like stack of solid blocks and empty gaps built from inexpensive laminate yet pitched at luxury buyers, with equilateral triangles both drawn and implied. French designer Martine Bedin oversaw the lighting; her wheeled Super lamp prototype now belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Californian potter Peter Shire joined after a 1977 magazine feature in which he said he would rather pour Coke from his teapots than tea.
Reactions were violent. Critics called the work bizarre and loathed; one line dubbed it a shotgun wedding between Bauhaus and Fisher-Price, and Terence Conran dismissed it as joke junk. Jasper Morrison admitted to a cold sweat on first sight, then to feeling liberated by the total rule-breaking. Sottsass himself left in 1985 to run Sottsass Associati, and the group folded two years later.
The look outlived its makers. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s it pushed aside earthy 1970s palettes on television, in malls and on surf, skate and BMX gear; Nickelodeon built the Double Dare set around it and Miami Vice showed off its architecture. David Bowie and Karl Lagerfeld collected the pieces, and part of Bowie's collection went to Sotheby's after his death in 2016. Later echoes include Dior couture for 2011–2012, vaporwave, and the flat startup illustrations Wired named Corporate Memphis.
Source: Memphis Group
