Memphis Style Jewellery — Postmodern Colour, Plastic, and the Refusal of Good Taste
Memphis Style Jewellery — Postmodern Colour, Plastic, and the Refusal of Good Taste
Bold geometry and clashing colour in pieces inspired by the 1981–87 Italian design collective
Memphis-style jewellery is the body of work — both pieces produced by members of the Memphis Group itself and the much larger derivative production it inspired — that translates the visual vocabulary of the Italian postmodern design movement into wearable form. The Memphis Group was founded in Milan in 1981 by Ettore Sottsass and a circle of younger architects and designers including Michele De Lucchi, Aldo Cibic, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Matteo Thun, Marco Zanini, and Martine Bedin. The collective dissolved formally in 1987, but the visual style — bright geometric forms, clashing colours, deliberate use of cheap industrial materials, and a programmatic refusal of modernist restraint — has continued to influence jewellery design through every postmodern revival since.
The Milanese context
Memphis emerged from the dissatisfaction Sottsass and his collaborators felt with the orthodoxies of Italian modernist design at the end of the 1970s. The dominant idiom of high Italian design — Olivetti, Cassina, Knoll — had become, in their reading, a closed and self-referential aesthetic of restrained good taste. Memphis was a deliberate counter-attack: laminate surfaces in shocking pinks and acid greens, asymmetric bookcases that looked like cartoon furniture, lamps that resembled spaceships. The first Memphis exhibition at the Salone del Mobile in September 1981 was a critical scandal and a commercial success in roughly equal measure; within a year, the style had been absorbed into the international postmodern vocabulary that defined the early 1980s.
For jewellery, the Memphis idiom translated into pieces that abandoned both the craft tradition of fine-stone setting and the polite mid-century geometry of post-war studio work. Sottsass and several of the original Memphis designers produced jewellery directly, often in collaboration with the Italian firm Acme and other manufacturing partners. Pieces typically employed enamelled or anodised metals in saturated primary and secondary colours, set with acrylic, plastic, or laminate components rather than precious stones, in geometric compositions of squares, triangles, circles, and zigzags whose proportions were deliberately at odds with classical jewellery balance.
Materials and construction
The material vocabulary is the most immediately recognisable element. Memphis jewellery typically uses anodised aluminium, enamelled steel or brass, brightly coloured acrylic and methacrylate, occasionally laminate or printed melamine, and silver or vermeil for higher-end pieces. Where precious or semi-precious stones appear, they are often selected for colour rather than rarity — turquoise, lapis, malachite, coral, brightly dyed agate — and set in compositions that subordinate the stone to the surrounding pattern rather than treating it as the focal point.
Construction tends to be additive and visible. Components are bolted, riveted, or threaded together rather than soldered into seamless wholes. Pieces wear their assembly like a feature rather than concealing it. The general effect is closer to a constructivist drawing made wearable than to a conventional finished jewel.
The wider influence
Beyond the original Memphis designers, the style spread rapidly through the international jewellery and fashion industries of the early to mid 1980s. Costume jewellery houses produced their own Memphis-influenced ranges; couture jewellery designers borrowed the colour palette and the geometric vocabulary while applying them to more traditional materials; and the broader postmodern moment in graphic design, interiors, and fashion ensured that Memphis-style jewellery looked at home in the visual culture of the period.
The reception in the high-jewellery houses was more measured. The major maisons did not abandon their established aesthetic codes, but Memphis-influenced motifs surfaced in occasional collections and one-off pieces, and the colour boldness of the 1980s coloured-stone revival — pieces combining sapphire, ruby, emerald, and yellow diamond in deliberately clashing palettes — owes something to the same cultural moment.
Decline and revival
By the late 1980s, Memphis had been so widely copied and so thoroughly absorbed into mainstream postmodern visual culture that it had largely lost its capacity to provoke. The collective's formal dissolution in 1987 was as much an acknowledgement of cultural saturation as a creative end. Through the 1990s, Memphis-style jewellery survived primarily in vintage and second-hand markets, where original Sottsass and other Memphis designer pieces gradually gained collector status.
The 2010s saw a sustained Memphis revival, driven partly by a generation of designers and curators rediscovering 1980s postmodernism through fashion, partly by major museum exhibitions including the 2011 Victoria and Albert Museum survey Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990, and partly by the broader cultural appetite for the colour and visual confidence of the original moment. Contemporary jewellery designers including Aurélie Bidermann, Hannah Martin, and several younger studios have produced pieces that explicitly cite the Memphis idiom.
Collecting Memphis-style jewellery
For collectors, the most desirable pieces are those by the original Memphis designers, particularly Sottsass himself, with documented provenance and dating to the 1981–87 active period of the collective. Pieces by Du Pasquier, Bedin, and the other founding members trade at significant premiums to anonymous Memphis-style production. Acme-manufactured pieces by named Memphis designers are well-documented and trade at consistent prices through specialist dealers and design auctions.
Anonymous Memphis-style jewellery from the 1980s — costume pieces, mass-market interpretations, and the wider commercial production of the period — is widely available at modest prices and represents the entry point for collectors building a thematic collection. Condition is the principal variable: the laminate, acrylic, and anodised metal components used in much Memphis-style work are not always durable, and original surface finishes can degrade.
Place in jewellery history
Memphis-style jewellery occupies a particular place in the history of late-twentieth-century design: it is the moment when fine and costume jewellery briefly aligned with the broader postmodern programme of refusing the inherited hierarchies of taste, material value, and seriousness. The pieces are not technically ambitious in the way that contemporaneous high-jewellery was; their interest lies in their cultural and visual position rather than in any innovation of stone-setting or metalwork. As a record of how the early 1980s decided that jewellery should look, Memphis-style work is both unmistakable and important.