Memphis Group

The Memphis Group, also known as Memphis Milano, was an Italian design and architecture group founded by Ettore Sottsass. It was active from 1980 to 1987. The group designed postmodern furniture, lighting, fabrics, carpets, ceramics, glass and metal objects. The Memphis Group's work often incorporated plastic laminate and terrazzo materials and was characterized by ephemeral design featuring colorful and abstract decoration as well as asymmetrical shapes, sometimes arbitrarily alluding to exotic or earlier styles and designs. Despite the original group's disbandment, Memphis Design went on to become a ubiquitous aesthetic in popular culture of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, overtaking the earth tones of the 1970s and early 1980s. In the late 1990s, Memphis was succeeded by the Y2K aesthetic.