Memphis-Milan is the great cultural phenomenon of the 1980s that revolutionized creative and commercial logic in design. Born in Milan in 1980 from the idea of ??Ettore Sottsass and a group of young designers and architects, who over the years have become famous designers on the international scene, Memphis has overturned all the existing parameters, precisely because his goal was to break the status quo of the design industry.
According to legend Ettore Sottsass was in his Milan apartment with a group of young designers, including the radical Michele De Lucchi, to discuss how design had become bourgeois and irrelevant by now … meanwhile we listened to Bob Dylan’s song by 1966 “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”. As a group, he decided at this precise moment to come together in a collective and to create a completely new collection, full of life and in step with the times, calling it Memphis.
Over the years many young designers passed through the collective, coming from different countries and cultures and all bringing their personal contribution in the context of a common manifesto; among them Martine Bedin, Andrea Branzi; Aldo Cibic, Michel Graves, Nathalie du Pasquier, Peter Shire, Javier Mariscal, George Sowden, Alessandro Mendini, Matteo Thun, Masanori Umeda, Arata Isozaki, Shiro Kuramata, Marco Zanuso jr and many others. To all of them, and to the supervision of Ettore Sottsass himself, we owe the most interesting projects of the Memphis group.
Memphis has imposed new shapes, new materials and new motifs on design. A first collection was born in 1981 with the financial support of Ettore Gismondi, president of Artemide, and immediately has an explosive effect: bright colors, an abundance of decorations, courageous asymmetries, totemic vertical furniture … nothing like this has ever been seen, catapulting the design in the extravagant and colorful universe of cinema, comics and pop art, to which the collective looks with interest and respect.
The objects of Memphis, produced in limited series, try to escape the banality of everyday life, taking up names that arouse an imaginary world in each of us, with a strong surprise effect thanks to the shapes and materials used, especially the decorative laminates of the Piedmontese society laminated Bra Abet, but also the Venetian ceramics and glass for the beautiful Sottsass vases, made according to the ancient techniques of the Venetian glass masters.
Among the most iconic pieces of the collection we can mention the colorful Carlton bookcase, the Tahiti lamp, the Totem Casablanca furniture, all designed by Ettore Sottsass, the Oceanic lamp and the first chair by Michele De Lucchi. the Oberoi armchairs and the lamp on wheels Super Lamp by Martine Bedin, the Palace chair by George Sowden and many other projects including furnishings, rugs (extraordinary those of Nathalie du Pasquier), ceramics, glass, silver, lamps, fabrics … all unscrupulous, colorful, brave and unconventional.
Memphis has become a symbol of New Design; its influence has been immense in the history of design and is still very strong in various sectors of production and beyond: its aesthetic has been taken up and embraced in various artistic fields in recent years.
