Night falls on December 11, 1980 in Milan. A group of young designers and architects have gathered in the living room of Ettore Sottsass, born in Innsbruck and graduated in Architecture from the Turin Polytechnic in 1939. The spritz gives way to red wine and olives and taralli to the charcuterie board select. Bob Dylan’s album Blonde on Blonde plays in a loop in the background and the song Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again seems to become the script for a play in which the protagonists are new materials, color, references to eroticism, the literature of Jack Kerouac’s beat generation, art deco, pop art and kitsch decoration. Can the cheap and the expensive coexist in the same space? Can art be synonymous with industrialization? Is beauty what will save man?
The hands of the clock dictate that it is time to make decisions, and with the Salone del Mobile a few months away, Sottsass, who had already worked for Poltronova and Olivetti after returning from New York, where he was working in George Nelson’s design studio , puts on the table the possibility of creating a revolutionary collection of design objects.
Together with Aldo Civic, Matteo Thun, Marco Zanini, Martine Bedin, Michelle De Lucchi, Nathalie Du Pasquier and George Sowden, he founded the group Memphis “as a tribute to that night in which they got down to work to create a new style designed for provoke emotions and desire, leaving rationalism behind. That night that reminds everyone of Bob Dylan’s song and that for them evokes both the ancient capital of the Egyptian pharaohs and the birthplace of Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley in Tennesseeâ€, explains Claire Bingham in her book More is More: Memphis, Maximalism, and New Wave Design.
As the architect Juli Capella, director of the De Diseño, Ardi and Domus magazines, as well as director of the Primavera del Diseño in 1993, said, “after the minimalist containment comes the chaos, and vice versaâ€. And that is precisely what explains the emergence of the Memphis movement in the eighties of the last century, as well as the current passion for decorating with daring and originality, with a festive spirit and without fear of mixing colors and geometries. As the Phaidon publishing house titles its book analyzing American postmodernist architecture, perhaps we can affirm that Less is a bore (less is boredom), as a counterpoint to Less is more (less is more) by Mies van der Rohe.
We are not talking in any case about furniture that is not exquisite. In fact, both Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent embraced the Memphis movement in their day. Known as the Kaiser of fashion, he furnished his Monte Carlo apartment with the movement’s most recent pieces before putting them up for auction in 1991, while Yves Saint Laurent bought several Sottsass lamps for his Parisian apartment alongside Paul Bergé.
And there is still more, in 2021, the current creative director of Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello, launched a limited edition capsule collection Saint Laurent Rive Droite with the Italian design and architecture firm Memphis, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the movement, combining the geometric, postmodern style of Memphis with the luxe streetwear aesthetic of Saint Laurent. And if we go back in time we will see even more the casual character of the Memphis style and its link with fashion.
We must bear in mind that the great Coco Chanel was a pioneer in the world of costume jewellery, mixing exquisite gems with other materials such as resin or porcelain. For her, the world of fashion was fantasy, and that is how the members of the Memphis movement lived it, who used neon tubes, colored light bulbs, metal plates or tinted glass mixed with noble materials such as marble and bronze.
“For the Memphis designers the problem of truth and authenticity, and vice versa, the problem of counterfeiting does not exist. What matters is the image, the design, the final product, the figurative force, the communicationâ€, Sottsass’s wife, Barbara Radice, always stressed. This is how the Memphis style entered our country through the front door, with collaborations with Javier Mariscal and with Camper commissioning various designs from the graphic artist Michele De Lucchi and the designer Nathalie du Pasquier.
“The artists of the Memphis movement, who, let us not forget, were from different countries and there were both men and women, something very pioneering at the time, sought to provoke after years of seeing how form always took precedence over function, a legacy of the Bauhaus. Now we designers need that playful and even ironic part of the design again. After the pandemic, one of my first projects was window dressing in Rabat, and I wanted to symbolize what would happen if a jewel exploded on the store’s façade, with all the color gradations that would entail. I like to devise projects in which those who catch a glimpse of them are moved and may even want to enter that window to play with the rest of the elements presentâ€, explains the designer Lucca Hugo Brucculeri, a designer who has also worked for Hermès, la Rinascente, Domestika and Calvin Klein.
“The generation that experienced the color, geometry and fun of the Memphis spirit in their childhood or adolescence feels nostalgic for those years, with their series, their colorful prints and decorative objects that defined a time in which harmony was synonymous. to break with all stylistic rules… In times of little faith in the destiny of humanity, art and design try to shed some light or optimism, and what better than Memphis to remind us now that not everything is grey, boring and identical. I am grateful to the artists of the Memphis movement for making me see the objects that surround me in a different way, full of singularity and daringâ€, adds the plastic artist and teacher Mireia Ruiz.
Who does not remember the series Saved by the Bell? The cafeteria where the students met was fully designed in keeping with this nod to 100% originality of the Memphis movement. And Blade Runner? As Ettore Sottsass said and his wife, Radice, later maintained, “contemporaneity means computers, electronics, video games, science fiction comics, spaceships…” Today all this is still in vogue and with it the Design Arty of the members of the group born in Milan. The creations of the movement between 1981 and 1985 are still produced today in unlimited series in order to show how design is a means of communication and not an expression of elitist art.
Nothing like visiting the Memphis Galleria Milano, in Largo Claudio Treves in the capital of Piedmont, to be seduced by that creative and mischievous effervescence. Goodbye to monochrome and rational language. Why should the finish of the sofa be in such timid harmony with the side table? Why can’t we make plastic laminate dialogue with Carrara marble or terrazzo? Can’t design take absurd and irrational forms?
In 1985 Sottsass left the group, but the spirit of this artistic movement took other business paths, such as Meta Memphis, or more recently the creative voice Post Design, with stylistic autonomy but the same philosophy of conceptual rethinking. Of course, with a greater openness to individual poetics. To them is added the so-called Neo Memphis, in full practice today, which work the same style, but in a more relaxed and pastel tonality, as well shown by firms such as the Scandinavian Hay, with its chandeliers and candles and its multiple cooking utensils. kitchen and Bicoca lamps from the Catalan brand Marset.
With that same flame and kitsch elegance, we find the Dutch chandeliers by Atelier Toit and Studio Roof, and, in a fusion with surrealism, the lamps by Volta Design, based in Girona. In fashion, three brands demonstrate their Memphis DNA this season: United Nude shoes, Mietis bags, with a showroom and store in Barcelona’s Poble Nou, and Woody’s Eyewear sunglasses. The latter’s offices, in Vic, move precisely between Memphis decor and WeirdCore psychedelia.
Colors, textures and materials. quality and sensitivity. Reflections on the concept of design and furniture, on its possibilities and its creative and productive pairing, are still on the minds of many designers today. For the rest of us, to whom Sottsass always wanted to give us the leading role, since we are the ones who decide what is art and what is not in our home, a decorative fan knocks on our door again and, what he and the Memphis collective would like most is that we put on music and give space to what is worthy of a colorful and vital feast.
