I have a feeling that it took a long time - like forever - to get the 1960s out of Sottsass, which is maybe why he was still playing that old Dylan track in 1980. Protest against the established order: that was a very 1960s thing. Memphis fits in with that, as does the attachment to youth culture. But let’s not push this too far: Memphis also fits well with the tradition, especially strong in Italy, of the master craftsman (or master artist) and his apprentices. Those youngsters all benefited hugely from their association with him. And he successfully reinvented himself, as (to take another example) Frank Lloyd Wright did at around the same age in the 1930s, also helped by close association with hero-worshipping apprentices.

Memphis was also a company: Sottsass and his chums got backing to put their stuff into production. But limited production. Memphis was hand-crafted, not mass-produced. It was designed mostly for the media, for a few collectors and fashion victims, and for museums. The first two collections were bought in their entirety by fan-fluttering frockmaker Karl Lagerfeld to furnish his Monte Carlo apartment. Now there was a man who knew a fashion moment when he saw one. But no normal sentient human being, surely, would ever buy that stuff. After all, although things were not as difficult as they would be a decade later, the western economy was nonetheless in too bad shape for people to want to splash out on manifesto-driven objects. The Eighties boom everyone refers to was the late Eighties, remember.

Now let’s be even more honest. I bought some Memphis-related objects. Let me haul them out of the drawer and examine them. They are not plastic laminate. They are tarnished silver plate. They are - true to Memphis’s ironic take on bourgeois suburban values - napkin rings. Or rather, napkin holders, since only two of the seven wiggly-shaped objects I bought are vaguely ring-shaped. Engraved inside each are the names “Nathalie du Pasquier: Ajumi Han”. I’m sure I should know who Ajumi Han is.

This sort of thing was as commercial as Memphis - by which I mean the broad movement rather than the trademark-protected output of the original collective - ever got. By the time such items were being designed - for Bodum, in this case - things had diffused somewhat. Those more tangentially connected with Memphis, such as Mendini, continued to produce objects heavily influenced by the movement, such as his range of kitchen appliances for Philips in the mid 1990s. That decade also saw the most convincing sub-Memphis architecture ever built, in the form of the extraordinary Groningen Museum, completed in 1994, masterminded by Mendini with contributions from Philippe Starck, Co-op Himmelblau and, yes, Michele de Lucchi to provide the connection back to the mother lode.

The original idea was for designers and artists - not architects - to make this cultural building complex set in a canal basin. Architects had to be drafted in, but the essential premise remained surprisingly intact (and many of the designers, as is the Italian way, had initially trained as architects anyway). The Groningen Museum is a superscaled collection of Memphis bibelots, possessing all the characteristics of random shape-making, frantic surface treatment, and elevation of the banal (check out the Delft tile-patterns plastered onto the underside of the drawbridge). It is all the more impactful for being built in Calvinist, modernist, Holland.

And that is nearly the end of the story, children. Memphis still exists as a company, producing the items from the various collections. Du Pasquier and Sowden remain married. Some of the others, especially de Lucchi, are doing nicely. Other post-modern designers and architects it sucked in, such as Michael Graves, Javier Mariscal, Peter Shire, Shiro Kuramata and Hans Hollein, gave the movement international credibility without jeopardizing their own careers. Sottsass still lives, and has given his blessing to the Design Museum retrospective. Memphis’s influence is pervasive, and not necessarily in the way you imagine. Jasper Morrison, for instance, has a soft spot for it - not least because, as he says, it gave him something to react against. Morrison’s purist furniture of the late 1980s was the necessary antidote to Memphis pomp. He knows that design cannot exist in a vacuum - that it must always feed off itself. That Memphis is in the bloodstream, and always will be.