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Go to shop29 September 2025
Memphis Milano was born in 1980 around Ettore Sottsass and a group of young designers determined to break away from Europe’s rigid functionalism. With vivid colors, eccentric shapes, and irony, the movement turned design into an emotional and symbolic language.
Making room for emotion: Memphis’ revolutionary impact marked a clear break with the extreme functionalism that had dominated European design a few years earlier. Colors, irony, organic forms, and experimentation concealed a shared design vision among a group of creatives who, on the evening of December 11, 1980, gathered at Ettore Sottsass’s home. They were Martine Bedin, Aldo Cibic, Michele De Lucchi, Nathalie Du Pasquier, George J. Sowden, and Matteo Thun. Although each had their own style and background, they were united by a common goal: to design a collection of objects with a completely unexpected profile. Such was the group’s enthusiasm that after just a few months, by February 1981, over one hundred projects were already on the drawing board.
The focus shifts from function to meaning, and the objects take on a disruptive formal profile, enlivened by color and bold, unprecedented lines. Even the simplest element is charged with meaning, emotion, and symbolism, and the choice to introduce it into a domestic interior is much more than the answer to an essential need; it is the desire to participate in a revolution of thought and taste.
This push toward the future is accompanied by a revival of artisanal skills, an essential act not only to distance oneself from the industrial production system but also to enrich the emotional component of the object itself. The hand of the artisan and their intervention become a language, and the materials are chosen to maximize a total sensorial experience.
Placing emotion and sensation at the center of the design approach was Memphis’s strategy for innovating design, with the awareness of producing not for the masses but for a niche.
Without ever neglecting function and ergonomics, Memphis restores dignity and a sense of purpose to decorative impact, to its most aesthetic, emotional, and communicative components: these are the intangible values of the object, values that Memphis embraces unreservedly. The core of original architects was later joined by Arquitectonica, Andrea Branzi, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Shiro Kuramata, Javier Mariscal, Peter Shire, Gerard Taylor, Masanori Umeda, and Marco Zanini. Each with their own style and a desire to be consistent with a shared aesthetic.
Among the group’s undisputed icons are the irreverent, captivating, and vaguely anthropomorphic Carlton bookcase by Ettore Sottsass; the Nikko chest of drawers by Shiro Kuramata; the Emerald dressing table by Nathalie Du Pasquier; the First chair by Michele De Lucchi; and the Super lamp by Martine Bedin, to name just a few.
Memphis’s present is still experimental, and for the latest Salone del Mobile in Milan, the group Italian Radical Design, which acquired Memphis, conceived a stand designed by the (AB)NORMAL studio, in which furniture and accessories designed between 1981 and 1986 are integrated into a domestic context. This underscores how its precious archive is more alive and relevant than ever, thanks also to some products presented for the first time: Venezia, the table designed by Sottsass in the period immediately preceding Memphis; Dorian and Ionan, two table mirrors by Michele De Lucchi; Sheraton, a monumental mirror by Luigi Serafini; Century, the chaise longue by Andrea Branzi in aquamarine tubular metal with a nod to the Bauhaus; and the Westside chair by Ettore Sottsass, inspired by Viennese Biedermeier chairs, also on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
