1981

The story goes that Bob Dylan’s Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again played throughout the meeting on the record player until it stuck on the word “Memphis”. It was December 1980 and designer Ettore Sottsass had gathered a group of colleagues in order to propose a new approach: one that plundered references to past styles, from kitsch to art nouveau, mixed them up and used the gaudily colourful, often boldly patterned and laminated results to undercut received wisdom of what constituted good design. For the seven years before Sottsass disbanded it, the Memphis movement and its rule-breaking, media-friendly hybrid pieces defined the high design of the decade and a Who’s Who of talent took to it: Shiro Kuramata, Javier Mariscal and Robert Venturi among them. Venturi’s Queen Anne chair (1984), a bent plywood chair covered with a pastel floral print plastic laminate, looked both backwards and forwards simultaneously, mixing the classical and “expensive” with the disposable and “cheap”. The old school dismissed it as mere fashion, its designs developmental dead-ends. But it introduced a new way of thinking to design: the post-modern.