In 1981, a group of Italian designers led by Ettore Sottsass got together in Milan and decided furniture had gotten boring. Their answer was Memphis, a design collective that treated bad taste as a design tool: clashing colors, plastic laminate, squiggles, and shapes that had no interest in being practical.
Memphis pieces looked less like furniture and more like props from a cartoon. A bookshelf could be shaped like a zigzag. A lamp could look like it belonged in a toy store. That was the point. After decades of minimalism telling designers that form should follow function, Memphis said form could just be fun.
The movement burned bright and fast. By the mid-1980s, Sottsass had already moved on, and Memphis as an organized studio was mostly done by 1988. But the visual language it invented, bold primary colors, confetti patterns, squiggles and terrazzo, never really left. It got absorbed into everything from MTV graphics to shopping mall interiors to the fabric patterns of the decade that followed.
At Eras, Memphis is the first chapter of our story: 1981, the loudest and least apologetic of the three movements we're building the collection around. Real design history, not a vague gesture at "the 80s."