Rarely can one say as much about a decade's look as about the 1980s. Bright color, chrome lettering, and daring innovation transformed fashion, record album covers, interiors, and poster designs during that era and have come roaring back into fashion in the design world today.
While the 1970s embraced austerity, the 1980s embraced extravagance.
And that attitude reflected the era's culture of contrasts, in which excess existed alongside conservatism, and the glossy surface of MTV co-existed with the underground.
Right at the heart of the decade's aesthetic was the formation of the Memphis Group on the very evening of December 16, 1981, in Milan by Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass and his young contemporaries.
The group's name was taken almost by chance—it was inspired by the song of Bob Dylan entitled "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," which was playing during their first get-together.
Memphis represented an outright rebellion against the austere functionalism of modernism. The aim of the group was to create furniture, ceramics, textiles, and patterns that would be, in their own words, radical, funny, and outrageous, using such styles as Art Deco, Pop Art, and even the 1950s kitsch.
The defining element of the movement was the "Bacterio print" pattern invented by Sottsass in 1978 and symbolizing the entire movement. It featured bold geometrical shapes (triangles, circles, and squiggles) and sharp contrasts between colors (neon ones and black-and-white stripes).
It was never safe from a commercial standpoint. As Barbara Radice, wife of Ettore Sottsass and Memphis historian, stated, it is impossible to call anything from the Memphis movement commercially successful at that time—but, for instance, David Bowie and Karl Lagerfeld helped to make some designs into cultural icons, while by 1984 the city of Memphis in Tennessee presented the keys of the city to Memphis designers.
Together with furniture and interiors, there was a parallel visual language developed for graphic design: the neon aesthetic became dominant.
Hot pink, electric cyan, and galvanized blue were used against dark backgrounds to maximize the contrast, and chrome texture or sans-serif fonts resembling the letters of a neon sign were used.
Grids, glow, and blooming effects imitating gas-filled neon tubes were created by designers trying to evoke the atmosphere of the nightlife and disco scene of that epoch. Together with the geometric shapes typical of Memphis style, it created an aesthetic language of abundance and vividness.
Memphis Design died young, with the movement coming to an end near the end of the 1980s, falling victim in part to the ephemeral nature that helped create it. Nevertheless, Memphis Design had left an enduring mark on the world of design.
Over three decades after its demise, designers from fashion brands such as Christian Dior and Missoni, together with a fresh generation of interior and graphic designers, have revived the style's vivid patterns and clash of colors – evidence of the fact that breaking the rules is an art form that is here to stay.
Photo: @Photography © Jacques Schumacher, courtesy of Thames & Hudson
