Technology & Romance - Fashion, Style, & Science. Art and design. Memphis / Design Museum Collection. MEMPHIS was a Milan-based collective of young furniture and product designers led by the veteran Ettore Sottsass.
After its 1981 debut, Memphis dominated the early 1980s design scene with its post-modernist style. Jasper Morrison remembers breaking into "a kind of cold sweat" and a "feeling of shock and panic" when he stumbled into the opening of a design exhibition at the Arc ’74 showroom in Milan on 18 September 1981. "It was the weirdest feeling," he recalled years later, "you were in one sense repulsed by the objects, or I was, but also immediately freed by the sort of total rule-breaking. "