Collection
Memphis – the design of the Memphis Milano group
Memphis is the loudest chapter of 1980s design – laminate furniture covered in dots and zigzags, lamps that look like toys and bookcases that look like totems. Ettore Sottsass’s group was active in Milan for only a few years, yet it changed how we think about objects for decades. Browse our Memphis design pieces.
An evening at Sottsass’s
In December 1980 Ettore Sottsass, then 63, invited a group of young designers to his Milan flat: Michele De Lucchi, Martine Bedin, Aldo Cibic, Matteo Thun and Marco Zanini. They talked about what design might look like if it stopped being serious. According to a legend the group was fond of repeating, Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” played on the record player all evening – hence the name, which also pointed to Elvis Presley’s Memphis and to the ancient capital of Egypt.
By February 1981 George Sowden and Nathalie Du Pasquier had joined, and there were more than a hundred designs. Andrea Branzi, Shiro Kuramata, Masanori Umeda, Peter Shire, Javier Mariscal and Michael Graves were among those who also worked with the group. Its coordinator and chief ideologue was the critic Barbara Radice.
September 1981
The first Memphis exhibition opened on 18 September 1981 at the Arc ’74 gallery in Milan, during the Salone del Mobile. Several dozen pieces of furniture, lamps and ceramics were shown, and crowds came to the opening – Martine Bedin recalled that when the designers saw the queue in the street, their first thought was that there had been an attack. The press was divided, but nobody walked past indifferent.
The icon of that show is Sottsass’s Carlton room divider of 1981: a multicoloured, anthropomorphic laminate structure that looks more like sculpture than furniture. Alongside it were, among others, the Casablanca sideboard, Martine Bedin’s Super lamp on wheels, Masanori Umeda’s Tawaraya bed in the shape of a boxing ring and Michael Graves’s Plaza dressing table. In the same year Barbara Radice published “Memphis: The New International Style”.
Laminate, colour, irony
Memphis was largely an experiment with material. Sottsass proposed to Abet Laminati that an entire collection be built from HPL laminates – a material until then associated with bars and kitchens. The first pieces were produced in summer 1981 at Abet’s works by Lake Como. Laminates printed with dots, zigzags and nervous squiggles were designed by Sottsass and Du Pasquier, among others; alongside them came terrazzo, lacquered metal, glass and ceramics.
The forms were just as provocative: asymmetry, volumes stacked like building blocks, legs and shelves set at angles, colours chosen to clash. Memphis rejected the idea that form follows function – an object was above all meant to communicate, surprise and amuse. Sottsass put it simply: the aim of Memphis was to exist.
The end of the group and the afterlife
Sottsass left the group in 1985, and Memphis was dissolved in 1987–1988. Its influence outlasted the group itself. In 1982 Karl Lagerfeld furnished his Monte Carlo apartment with Memphis pieces, and in 2016 Sotheby’s in London sold David Bowie’s Memphis collection – around 100 objects. The Vitra Design Museum staged “Memphis: 40 Years of Kitsch and Elegance” in 2021–2022, and the Metropolitan Museum held a Sottsass retrospective in 2017.
Original Memphis furniture usually carries a metal plaque with the Memphis name, the designer and the year of design, while ceramics bear a signature impressed in the clay. Memphis designs are still produced under licence today, so a plaque alone does not settle when a piece was made. The production period and condition of every piece are described on its product page.
