The Furniture Movement Named After a Bob Dylan Song

On December 6, 1980, Ettore Sottsass invited a group of younger Milanese designers and architects to his apartment to talk about what came after modernism. He was 63, an Italian veteran of Olivetti, and tired of the Bauhaus inheritance — clean lines, primary colors, function-as-form, no ornament without an alibi. The younger designers wanted to throw all of it out.

Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" played on repeat in the background. By the end of the night they had a name. Memphis was a city in Tennessee. Memphis was also a capital of ancient Egypt. The double meaning was the point.

The group debuted nine months later at the 1981 Salone del Mobile in Milan. They showed furniture in clashing geometric patterns, lamps that resembled toys, ceramics with cartoonish proportions. The signature surface was plastic laminate — Abet Laminati, fake wood, fake marble, fake terrazzo — chosen exactly because high modernism despised it as cheap and dishonest. Sottsass's Carlton room divider, a freestanding shelving unit in red, yellow, and black with diagonal struts, became the emblem of the show.

The critical reception was split between adulation and horror, which was also the point. By 1987 the group had dissolved; the work was too radical to sustain a furniture business. The aesthetic kept going without them. For most of the next decade — Pee-wee's Playhouse, Saved by the Bell graphics, the look of mid-eighties America — what people were copying was Memphis.