The more one looks at it, the more one finds that du Pasquier seems to sum up the whole ethos of Memphis more whole-heartedly than some of the others. Perhaps because, at the time, she was so young. It was a big adventure. The downside of that was that she was perhaps more associated with an ephemeral style than was perhaps healthy. Later, she turned from design to painting and curating, and then back again. One suspects that after that heady immersion in Memphis - like people’s experience of the Blitz - nothing else would ever be so interesting again.
And so now we pay homage to the movement. It was 20 years ago, so it is safe to exhume. Moreover, we are now at a point when designers, architects, and editors are once again showing signs of weariness with form-follows-function clean-limbed modernism, not to mention ultra-minimalism, and are hankering after something a bit more gamey. Postmodernism is not the dirty word it was all through the 1990s. Even supposedly puritan architects such as Herzog and de Meuron, responsible for Tate Modern and the upcoming Laban dance centre in Deptford , are very happy to apply superficial decorative motifs to their buildings in a way that Mendini and Sottsass would recognize. Other architects much concerned with texture and surface treatment, such as Jean Nouvel, are busier than ever.
Even our own Lord Foster of Thames Bank, to whom the whole Memphis thing must surely be anathema, is now designing super-expressive buildings such as the Greater London Authority HQ, which revel in form-making for its own sake, rather than for any ostensible functional purpose. And he is rediscovering the use of colour, which he was last happy to use in the 1970s. Meanwhile Deconstruction, of the Zaha Hadid variety, was absorbed by Memphis right back at the beginning when it was all on paper, with nothing built. Look at some of Peter Swire’s tables.
What all this tells us is not so much that we are due for a Memphis revival - though no doubt sales from the Milan showroom will accelerate sharply as the items emerge from their decade of unfashionability - but that the re-evaluation of Memphis points to something else. Memphis is history, and it’s interesting, but we don’t need all that again. It was indeed a Karl Lagerfeld fashion moment, and its protagonists long ago moved on. The revived interest in Memphis points instead to the need for a new movement to gee everybody up. Frankly, things are just too damn tame at the moment. The college degree shows are presenting derivative work. The designers in charge of the shop are more or less those who emerged post-Memphis as young bloods and are now in positions of power. It is all way too predictable.
I haven’t got a clue what the new movement will be, nor who its instigators will be, or even if it will happen at all. All I know is that we need a moment, in somebody’s flat, perhaps with some emotionally-charged music playing, in which some ideas are sketched which are, well, novel. I’m waiting. We are all waiting.
