How the Memphis Design Movement Made a Comeback

This article is part of our latest Design special report, about creative people finding fresh ways to interpret ideas from the past.

To call an armchair or a bookcase “revolutionary” might seem like a stretch, but for the design world, the original show of the Memphis design movement was as genuinely shocking as the first Sex Pistols performance. But unlike his revolutionary punk predecessors, Ettore Sottsass, this design moment’s founder, certainly knew the rules he was breaking when the Memphis group debuted in Milan 40 years ago.

He was as enthusiastic about designing businesslike computers and typewriters for Olivetti as he was about producing phallic-looking ceramics. There had been nothing quite as disruptive in the design world as the Memphis collective since Walter Gropius opened the doors of the Bauhaus over a half-century earlier.

What Sottsass could not have foreseen was that decades later, there would also be another upstart version of the movement.