On 11 December 1980, Ettore Sottsass founded Memphis Milano, one of the Italian design groups that tried to rethink the codes of design, breaking design patterns and rethinking product culture.
Now the design studio has been bought by Italian Radical Design, which has already owned Gufram for ten years (“Pratone” by Ceretti/Derossi/Rosso, the “Bocca” by Studio65). The acquisition of Memphis Milano is part of the project to preserve Italian design brands, strengthening their identity and making them more contemporary. The revalorisation of a studio such as that of Michele De Lucchi, Aldo Cibic, Martine Bedin, Marco Zanini and Matteo Thun is an operation of restoration of the Italian heritage, in years when design was going through a season of great conceptual rethinking of its language.
he works of what has been a design experiment will be presented in an exhibition scheduled for 2022, as announced by the group founded by Sandra and Charley Vezza. In recent years the historical archive of Memphis had been kept alive through re-editions of some of the studio’s most significant products and the appeal of works such as Sottsass’s Carlton furniture or Peter Shire’s Bel Air armchair.
The union of Memphis and Gufram under the same entrepreneurial and communicative strategy is great news for the world of Italian design, a sense of continuity that starts from the need to revitalise a chromatic design, of materials that photograph the trends of the 1980s as well as geometries that are the daughters of anti-academism.
Here are some of the works designed by Memphis Milano that have marked an era of Italian style.
BEL AIR – Designer: Peter Shire – 1982
TAHITI – Designer: Ettore Sottsass – 1981
CARLTON – Designer: Ettore Sottsass – 1981
TAWARAYA RING – Designer: Masanori Umeda – 1981
RIVIERA – Designer: Nathalie Du Pasquier – 1983
