Sottsass, an industrial designer, philosopher and provocateur, gathered a core group of young designers into a collective in 1980 they called Memphis. Members of the Memphis Group, which would come to include Martine Bedin, Michael Graves, Marco Zanini, Shiro Kuramata, Michele de Lucchi and Matteo Thun, saw design as a means of communication, and they wanted it to shout. That it did: The first Memphis collection appeared in 1981 in Milan and broke all the modernist taboos, embracing irony, kitsch, wild ornamentation and bad taste. With that in mind, we’re going to give you tips on how to leverage this classic style to your benefit by walking you through the history of Memphis Design and its modern incarnations. What is Memphis Design? The Memphis Design movement is one of unlikeliest success stories in the history of design. Like so many artistic reactions, it began as an outlet for its creators, a way to rail against and confound elite sensibilities. The result was a style that was revolutionary in its time and whose spirit is a continual source of inspiration to this day. Design by OrangeCrush As popular and influential as Memphis Design has been over the years, it can sometimes get a bad rap. It is a loud, colorful style that is hard to separate from its era. And when implemented without care, it can make some design projects feel antiquated. On the other hand, a good designer can turn these sins into virtues: obnoxious retro becoming lively nostalgia.

Long before all this, there had been a number of fine art and design movements that precipitated Memphis Design, and these were likely on the guests’ minds as they traced where it all had gone wrong. Kadinsky’s work also likely inspired the Memphis design movement. Image via Wikimedia commons Imagine you’re at a party, and you’re bored. You’ve been bored for a while—years, it feels like. You wonder how a party, something that is supposed to be fun, can feel like it’s draining the life out of your very soul. As you look around the yawning faces of the guests, you realize it’s going to take drastic measures to salvage any excitement out of this long night. So you sneak a desperate gulp of your drink, slip on your tinted sunglasses and leap atop of the sofa. You’ve sacrificed yourself to karaoke. But no style was more influential on Memphis Design than modern minimalism. “Form follows function,” the classic Bauhaus mantra, had been twisted to deem any aesthetic flair unnecessary. WWII further escalated this sentiment as shortages in materials led to largely sparse, utilitarian styles that carried over as the decades marched on. The designers that made up the Memphis group, founded by Ettore Sottsass. Image via Memphis Milano But unlike most flash-in-the-pan fads, the underlying appeal of Memphis Design was just too strong to vanish completely. That’s why you can see iterations of the style persisting on into the 90s in the fashion and set design of Saved by the Bell or the widely distributed Jazz Design on disposable cups. And in the next section, we’ll talk about how the Memphis Movement is still with us today. Saved by the Bell carried the torch of Memphis Design into the 90s. Image via NBC Examples of how to use Memphis Design today The birth of Memphis Design was a lot like this, starting with a gathering of architects and industrial designers in Milan, Italy in 1981. But it wasn’t the party that bored the guests. It was the general state of design—how creativity had stagnated to become corporate and uniform. De Stijl is a past style that likely inspired the Memphis design movement. Image via Wikimedia commonsPostmodern design was a short-lived movement that manifested itself chiefly in Italy and the United States in the early 1980s. The characteristics of vintage postmodern furniture and other postmodern objects and decor for the home included loud-patterned, usually plastic surfaces; strange proportions, vibrant colors and weird angles; and a vague-at-best relationship between form and function.

As design influence is cyclical, it is quite easy to spot products showing the influence of Memphis design. During the short life of the movement, Memphis members experimented with bright colors, shapes and materials. This approach to design was in many ways a protest against the dark colors and sleek minimalist design of the 1970s. While the designs of the Memphis group divide opinion, one thing is certain, it reflects 1980’s kitsch and whilst not always generally accepted as tasteful, the Memphis look was certainly ground breaking. Over time the Memphis group have influenced many design disciplines from graphics and fashion to products, interiors and textiles. Although it began with furniture, the style proved popular enough to extend to general art, graphic design and fashion. The intentional “bad taste” fit in neatly with the decade that saw the rise of glam metal, shoulder pads and parachute pants, Mohawks and big hair perms. In short, the 80s were over-the-top and not afraid to flaunt it. MTV’s logo featured a variety of Memphis patterns in the 80s. Via MTV A designer of Italian origins, Paolo has over 13 years industry experience obtained from working in mixed discipline design studios in the UK and abroad. These include the abstract shapes and colors of Cubism, De Stijl and Harlem Renaissance art. Also the Pop Art movement of the 60s, which challenged highbrow taste by incorporating elements of popular “low” culture.Critics derided postmodern design as a grandstanding bid for attention and nothing of consequence. Decades later, the fact that postmodernism still has the power to provoke thoughts, along with other reactions, proves they were not entirely correct. Data for the years before 1970 is not available for Memphis, however, we have earlier time zone history for Chicago available. Italian design collective the Memphis Group, also known as Memphis Milano, meets for the first time (1980) Postmodern design began as an architectural critique. Starting in the 1960s, a small cadre of mainly American architects began to argue that modernism, once high-minded and even noble in its goals, had become stale, stagnant and blandly corporate. Later, in Milan, a cohort of creators led by Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini — a onetime mentor to Sottsass and a key figure in the Italian Radical movement — brought the discussion to bear on design.

Whether you want an antique timepiece or one that will match a modern motif, you are sure to find one to suit any home or office decor. Memphis Design found a particular home in US youth culture, standing in sharp contrast to the austerity of the Reagan administration. This was capped by the emerging MTV channel adopting the aesthetic for its logo. Architect Robert Venturi critiques modern architecture in his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)