Memphis, Sottsass and the Laminate That Broke Good Taste

On September 18, 1981, the Arc '74 gallery in Milan opened the first Memphis exhibition, a roomful of furniture surfaced in cheap plastic laminate and colored like a cereal box. The man behind it, Ettore Sottsass, was 64 and had spent a quarter century designing machines for Olivetti. Nobody expected the grown-up in the room to start the riot.

A Dylan Record on Repeat

The group took shape one evening in December 1980, when Sottsass invited a circle of young designers and architects to talk about where design should go next. Bob Dylan's Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again kept playing in the background, over and over, and the name stuck. They liked the ambiguity. Memphis is a blues town in Tennessee named after a capital of ancient Egypt, and the double meaning suited a group that had no interest in being one thing. The Triennale Milano credits Sottsass and the critic Barbara Radice, his wife since 1976, as founders.

Three months later, according to the Design Museum in London, they met again carrying around a hundred drawings. The roster that eventually formed is a who's who of 1980s design. Michele De Lucchi, Aldo Cibic, Matteo Thun, Marco Zanini, George Sowden, Nathalie Du Pasquier and Martine Bedin were at the core. Peter Shire, a sculptor and potter, came in from California. Masanori Umeda, Shiro Kuramata, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Andrea Branzi and Javier Mariscal added work as well.

Why a Serious Designer Chose Laminate

Sottsass had earned the right to misbehave. Born in Innsbruck on September 14, 1917, he graduated in architecture from the Politecnico di Torino in 1939 and opened his own studio in Milan in 1947. Adriano Olivetti hired him as a design consultant in 1956. His Elea 9003 mainframe computer won the Compasso d'Oro in 1959, and in 1969 he and Perry A. King gave the world the Valentine portable typewriter. Through the late 1960s and 1970s he also ran with Italy's radical design movement, alongside groups like Superstudio, Archizoom and Global Tools.

Memphis was where all that restlessness went public. The core material was plastic laminate, the stuff of kitchen counters and diner tables, with terrazzo patterns lifted from flooring. Putting it on a bookcase was the joke and the point. Few movements in furniture have been so openly about surface. It was the exact opposite of the restraint that Dieter Rams was preaching at Braun, and a direct shot at the clean modernist line that ran back to the Bauhaus.

The signature piece is Sottsass's 1981 Carlton room divider, a totem pole of bright laminate built from solid blocks and open voids. An example sits in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. His Casablanca bookcase came the same year. Martine Bedin put her Super lamp on wheels, and the V&A holds her first prototype. Michael Graves contributed the Plaza dressing table and stool in 1981. The Triennale's history of the collective is a good place to see the full spread.

Lagerfeld Bought Almost All of It

Plenty of people hated it, and of everything in our design coverage, Memphis is still the subject most likely to start an argument. The Design Museum notes that many critics ridiculed the work and dismissed Memphis as a fad. One very rich man disagreed. Karl Lagerfeld bought almost the entire inventory to furnish his apartment in Monte Carlo, then sold the lot at Sotheby's in 1991.

By then the group was already over. Sottsass left in 1985 to concentrate on his architecture firm, Sottsass Associati. Memphis had been conceived from the start as temporary, and the Triennale dates the end to 1988, though some histories put it a year earlier.

David Bowie was the other great collector. He assembled more than a hundred Memphis and Sottsass pieces, and after his death in 2016 Sotheby's London sold one hundred of them on November 11 that year, with a Carlton carrying a pre-sale estimate of £7,000. Sottsass himself had died in Milan on December 31, 2007, at 90.

The Afterlife Is Longer Than the Life

Memphis ran for seven years and has been resurfacing ever since. The Wikipedia entry on the Memphis Group tracks the trail. Nickelodeon built the set of Double Dare in the style. Vaporwave picked it up in the 2010s, and Wired coined the term Corporate Memphis for the flat illustration style that was everywhere in the late 2010s. Dior's Fall/Winter 2011 to 2012 couture show and Missoni's Winter 2015 collection both drew on it. Du Pasquier made Memphis-style patterned bags with HAY in 2013 and a collection for American Apparel a year later.

The furniture never fully stopped either. Memphis Milano still manufactures pieces from the original era, and in early 2022 Dezeen reported that Italian Radical Design, the company behind Gufram, had acquired the brand, with Sandra and Charley Vezza directing it. Milan is still where this argument plays out every spring, and our Milan Design Week guide covers the city as it is now. Our industrial design hub has the machines Sottsass made before he started breaking things.

Peter Shire's Bel Air armchair is still in production. That means you can buy, brand new, a chair that was designed in the Memphis years to annoy the tasteful.