Unconventional and Fun in Design

Tacky? Bad Taste? Or a nice change from beige, black, and taupe? High or low culture? A serious work of art or a frightening mess from the 1980s?

HG’s pseudo vase is all of the above. It is not functional; it is just hilarious. 

It is an Art Glass piece (20” h), likely by Ettore Sottsass, the founder of the Memphis Milano Group, Italian designers active from 1980 to 1987. If you lived through the ‘80s, you would have experienced this style, meant to be a slap in the face to tonal, overly tasteful, aesthetically pleasing design of the 1960s and 1970s.

Memphis Milano was anything but subtle and refined. It is characterized by asymmetry, neon colors offset with pastels, geometric totem-like shapes, abrupt and jarring color blocking, an emphasis on random spheres, cones, and cylinders – as un-classic as a piece of design could possibly be.

Why? An Italian taste shifting rebellion of course.

In 1980, in the living room of glass artist Sottsass, 22 hip Italian designers congregated and hated on the rarified styles of Danish Modern, Eames, Gropius, and all the other aesthetes. They wanted to make rooms fun again: a mix of Art Deco, Pop Art, and Op Art – surprising, loud, and based on plastic laminate.

The theme? 

LESS IS BORE! As opposed to the 1960s dictum, Less Is More.

In HG’s vase, we see the tasteless electric yellow, the magenta, the foil cobalt floating in the column. The work has no purpose but to shock (it cannot hold water or flowers). The piece is a creative approach to an everyday object but literally functionless; a contrarian pushback to the 1960’s dictum Form Follows Function… get it?

Other objects from Memphis Milano included a table lamp with bulbs arrayed along a vividly colored semi-circle; a chair whose diagonalized circular tube – onto which orbiting spheroids have been fastened – comprises the back and arms (impossible for comfortable seating); and the classic Carlton 303 bookcase for wine storage and books (one supposes), its laminate surfaces so redolent with trashy colors and mismatched patterns that none other than David Bowie owned one.

Another adherent of the style was Karl Lagerfeld, who used the aesthetic in his Monte Carlo summer house.

The American studio Ibex noticed the style as it expanded from Italy, and you might wonder why the style was named Memphis after our U.S. city. There are two main places called Memphis: one in Tennessee and one in Egypt (in fact, the ancient dynastic capital), a fitting tribute to a design movement which is lowbrow and highbrow at the same time.

Furthermore, at the main meeting of the 22 Italian designers in 1980, someone played Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” and they, under Dylan’s influence (the record stuck on auto play) all agreed to present a whole new look at a meeting three months in the future. That cohort’s approach would embrace and loudly exemplify the postmodern aesthetic.

These designers hated Brutalism, the horrific facades of postwar concrete buildings, and machine-made objects, uniform in their style and shapes and bland colors. But by 1987 the designers bickered, and the aesthetic faded.

Faded, until today.

Portuguese design house Hommés Studio has stated that Memphis is back, indeed as a reaction (as it was in the beginning) to overly tasteful and restrained mid-century modernism, which they consider boring (so do I). Indeed, post-postmodernism is in the throes of a revival. They point to a 2005 show at LACMA of Ettore Sottsass’s work in glass and furniture; Christian Dior’s Memphis-based clothing collection of 2011; the 2016 Supreme skateboard decks in Memphis designs; West Elm’s product line of Memphis fabrics; and the 2022 Triennale Milano show called 200 Objects 1981-1986, celebrating Memphis design. In fact, as of this past May, the high-end design world has rediscovered Sottsass’ work, with the top price paid at Phillips in New York reaching $385,388 for brightly colored plastic laminate “school-type” lockers.

Just in the last three months, the auction world has gone Sottsass-crazy in Europe. The German house Koller will be auctioning his works soon, with estimates around $35,000 for a really good piece of tacky furniture. Also in play are the Italian house Piasa, the Japanese house Mainichi, the Chicago house Wright, Palm Springs’ Leonard Joel, Christie’s New York, Artcurial Paris, and even Britain’s Lyon & Turnbull.

So, game on, you midcentury modern purists. Memphis is bad taste, but I like it.

Yes, it is clown furniture, but it is coming back to challenge “good taste, 2026” and I, for one, applaud. 

Less is indeed boring.