That Memphis Moment

Nathalie Du Pasquier placemat, Third Drawer Down

Memphis, the 1980s design movement, is having a moment. The work of Nathalie Du Pasquier appeared on the cover of the Milan Design Week issue of Disegno, and at multiple installations there. Her graphics have been applied to a variety of unwearables by American Apparel. For those over 25, may I suggest the placemats by Third Drawer Down as an alternative. In Memphis (the city), the Dixon Gallery is showing Dennis Zanone’s collection of vintage Memphis, the first US exhibit since a major display at the Cooper-Hewitt in 1986.

1986 was when I first discovered Memphis, in Milan. My family lived there during a seven-month sabbatical and those totemic shapes, those brilliant patterns, turned up everywhere. They remain wrapped up in my mind with the OTT cherubs on sale at Fiorucci, tucked into the historic Galleria, and the more measured prints at Naj-Oleari, where the laminated bookbags featured tiny cars rather than Du Pasquier’s squibs and squiggles. In a bid for most sophisticated high school junior in North Carolina, I wrote a paper on Memphis (I can still visualize the hand-cut cobalt cover), drawing heavily on Barbara Radice’s book.

My favorite Memphis piece, then as now, was leader Ettore Sottsass’s iconic Carlton shelf Its crisp outlines work against the sweetly pastel laminates in a way that is obviously knowing. It walks right up to the edge of tacky and turns up its nose. It is a shelf that, like its right-angle modernist predecessors by Prouve and Perriand, needs to hold nothing.

Why now? Pungent artificiality. Patterns that aren’t supposed to look like anything. Colors not found in nature. The return of Memphis feels like a rebellion against the neo-handicraft era, the fetishization of the hand, the wood surface, the stitch. When even your iPhone cover is meant to look hand-painted, you know the time is ripe for rebellion. Back to plastic! Back to pattern, already creeping (like a fungus, like a vine, like a relief) over architectural facades, basic Gap sweatshirts, sneakers. It’s an admission and exploitation of what is simply a surface. Formica moved from being a tougher imitation of life into an original, often richly referential canvas in the 1950s, Memphis pushed that idea further in the 1980s. Brighter colors, crisper printing, exploitation of the revealing black edge. Memphis, in its own way, was true to its materials. We need a break from our own good taste; Memphis provides an out with intellectual credentials.

Throw off your Breton striped shirts! Embrace the squiggle.