Jasper went to the opening of the first Memphis collection, a much-hyped and influential event at that year’s Milan Fair.
The Memphis opening event was quite something, almost certainly the first big Salone event in town. People were talking about it before it opened and crowds of people pressed to get in. I don't know how I got in, but I did.
The exhibition gave me a kind of cold sweat, a feeling of shock and panic like: ‘It’s already happened!’ It was the strangest feeling: you were in one sense repulsed by the objects, or I was, but also immediately freed by the sort of total rule-breaking. So it was a very confusing emotion. Design’s rule book had been torn up but I disagreed with the approach that proposed to replace it. It was clearly a major new force in design but not one I was drawn to. I thought Andrea Branzi’s later Century sofa was a more interesting blend of rational thought and something more poetic. There was too much expression for me in the other pieces, like music played too loudly.
Studio Alchimia, which had shown previously in Milan, was more radical than Memphis, but it was the contradiction of the commercial glitz of Memphis, combined with the almost completely impractical nature of the products that proved shocking. The Memphis exhibition sent shock waves through the academic world in Europe. Suddenly you could say: ‘But why can’t I do it this way, it’s valid if that’s what’s going on’. Memphis was the opposite of everything I believed, because as a design student, I had the impression that design was supposed to provide people with useful things at affordable prices. It’s maybe not the most practical kind of design but it had the effect to free everything up, to show that we didn’t have to accept all these constraints and all these ridiculous rules about how one should design. Design should be open to different ways of working.
The benefit was that I returned to Kingston with more belief in doing things my way, and not so willing to accept that design had to comply with the old rules. I immediately did my one and only Memphis piece, a bookshelf.