posted 10-07-2010 08:52 AM            

As a child of the 80s, I seem to have a special fondness for 80s design, especially jewelry (good designs-not items from the Dynasty costume department!).

Late 1980s industrial style anodized aluminum & diamond bangle.

Brooch, sterling, gold & ebony, dated 1986 by Lorelei Hamm. The components can be moved to change the brooch into different shapes. Hamm studied at SUNY Plattsburgh and at the University of Copenhagen, and is still active today.

Early to mid 80s handmade chrome earrings.

Mid-80s Memphis style brooch, laminated plastic and stainless steel wire.

posted 10-07-2010 08:53 AM            

Mid-80s brooch designed by Marion Sampler (1920-1998), a West Coast graphic artist.

Brooch, 1986, Gerard Taylor (Memphis Group) for Acme.

Mid-1980s earrings, handmade aluminum with rivets and dangles.

posted 10-07-2010 08:59 AM            

Here are some other pieces from around the web.

80s brooches by Herve van der Straeten, who originally designed jewelry for fashion designers like Thierry Mugler, continues to have his own eponymous lines.

80s aluminum bangles by Glen Yank, a NYC jewelry who works mostly in aluminum with industrial and geometric forms.

posted 10-07-2010 07:13 PM            

Can you show any hallmarks, if any?

Thank you.

posted 05-03-2011 07:23 PM            

Peter Shire "Barbarian" earrings, 1985

posted 07-31-2012 09:47 PM            

Here is an article from the Guardian that looks back, in 2001, at Memphis.

quote:

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Love it or loathe it?

The Memphis group changed the face of modern design. But was it for the better, asks Jonathan Glancey

For young designers at the beginning of the 1980s, Memphis was a revelation. Now in their 40s, these same designers speak of this wilfully provocative and short-lived design group with a mixture of reverence and repulsion. Founded by the Milanese designer and architect Ettore Sottsass, it incited designers of everyday objects - from office chairs to buildings via wallpaper and vases - to break away from clean-cut mainstream modern European design. Nathalie du Pasquier, one of the Memphis team, describes it as "a way of life, of transferring into the world of the western home the culture of rock music, travel and a certain excess".

However ephemeral, Memphis certainly had an effect. Introduced to the world at the 1981 Milan Furniture Fair, where it stole the show, Memphis was the major influence on Philippe Starck, today the world's best known and most imitated designer. Those wacky hotel lobbies for Ian Schrager in Miami, New York and Hong Kong, and that best-selling lemon-squeezer, have more than a bit of Memphis about them.

Yet if you visit the new Memphis show at the Design Museum in London, you may be disappointed by what you see. Lots of brightly coloured, neo-1950s plastic laminates covering everything from crazy sideboards to bonkers beds. Was this gimcrack stuff really so influential? Had the brown-and-orange 1970s been so boring that product design had to descend into these cartoon capers?

Many designers, though, still talk of Memphis in the way that rock musicians of the same age speak of the Clash and Blondie. Jasper Morrison, a cool minimalist and one of Britain's most respected product designers, was at Kingston Polytechnic at the time. He went to the first Memphis show in 1981. "It was the weirdest feeling - you were in one sense repulsed by the objects, but also freed by this sort of total rule-breaking. I came back to college and immediately did my one and only Memphis piece, which hopefully has now disappeared forever."

Colin Burn was studying industrial design: "It rocked my world. Seeing the Memphis work had the same effect on my perception of design that listening to the Ramones a few years earlier had on my thinking about music. But it looks dated now and it's remarkably hard to remember how shocking it all was back then."

Far more enthusiastic are collectors such as Karl Lagerfeld, the Paris-based fashion designer. "It was love at first sight. I'd just got an apartment in Monte Carlo and I could only imagine it in Memphis. Now it seems very 1980s, but the mood will come back. The pretensions of minimalism made it difficult for Memphis in the 1990s, but I think Sottsass is one of the design geniuses of the 20th century."

On the face of it, Memphis's philosophy was more than a little airy. "Memphis," said Sottsass, "exists in a gelatinous, rarefied area whose very nature precludes set models and definitions." On a more substantial level, it was a pent-up reaction against the slick "black box" design favoured by makers of nearly everything in late-1970s Europe, from typewriters and cameras to office furniture, cars and buildings themselves.

This was the era of the shiny, black glass office block - which, in the hands of most architects, was ineffably banal. In the US, it was also the heyday of postmodern architecture and design. Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, Robert Stern, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown were strutting the architectural catwalk with slapstick-style buildings that were a big and blowsy two-fingers up to the stern values of the Bauhaus and what Johnson had labelled the International Style when he was modernism's most ardent American advocate in the early 1930s.

Sottsass called Memphis design the New International Style and plunged the sophisticated and influential Milan design world into a labyrinth of visual irony, puns and provocations. In effect, he was injecting a dose of postmodernism into mainstream European design. This was design as cultural criticism, rather than as a functional tool or statement of modernist intent.

Sottsass himself is a complex figure. The son of an architect, he was born in Innsbruck in 1917. The family later moved to Turin, where Ettore graduated from the polytechnic in 1939, in time to serve with the Italian army. After the war, he designed furniture and interiors for mass housing projects. His particular talent was moving dexterously between extravagant and even absurd design to logical architecture and cool industrial styling.

Perhaps this is what growing up in Turin did for him. The city is home to some of the most adventurous of all baroque and modern architecture. Think of the eye-boggling Chapel of the Holy Shroud by Guarino Guarini, and of Fiat, the car giant with its ultra-modern factory with a race-track on its roof. Here, sensuous architecture and rational product design have long been combined in an inspirational mix.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Sottsass travelled to the US and India and became influenced by both Pop and tantric art. What could product design and architecture learn from these? Humour, sensuousness and multi-layered meanings, perhaps.

For an older generation of designers, although not as old as Sottsass himself, the Memphis movement seemed plain silly. Terence Conran, 69, although a friend, thought it "funny, peculiar and rather like the emperor's new clothes. It was not to be taken seriously."

Has Memphis design influenced Conran in any way? "No."

Memphis could at least be relied upon to get a reaction. James Irvine, another industrial design graduate from Kingston, went to work with Sottsass in 1984. "I worked closely with Ettore for 13 years, at Olivetti until 1992 and as his partner until 1997. I always worked with him as an industrial designer and I think, luckily for me, Memphis wasn't part of the discussion. Looking back now, the influence on me was to avoid it. It was already over and, as such, was to be steered clear of."

Paola Antonelli, a curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, thought Memphis was "atrocious" when studying in Milan in 1981. "With few exceptions - Sottsass's Carlton sideboard being one and Shiro Kuramata's pieces another - I still find the original Memphis collection very hard to swallow. It wasn't the first postmodern reaction to the status quo, but it certainly has been the first - and maybe the only one - to have an influence in the wider world. It was about turning the design world upside down just for the time of a few collections, yet the recipe was very easy to follow. Hence the innumerable bad copies we've seen all over the world."

There is, it must be said, a fine line to be drawn between Memphis and the sort of stuff you create with an MFI flatpack and rolls of coloured plastic. After gawping at yet another cabinet made from MDF and covered in Sottsass's comic-book Bacterio plastic laminate, it was hard not to sigh for the strictures and certainties of the Bauhaus.

The whole point of Memphis was to demonstrate that design could mutate like bacteria, that it was as open to change as Pop art. And yet Sottsass continued to design sophisticated electronic computer kit for Olivetti, the Italian corporation that had given him his first big break as a designer in 1958. He later began to concentrate on architecture.

Whatever Memphis was intended to achieve, it was ultimately a safety valve for designers who were bored styling yet another tasteful office chair, chic desking system or banal computer terminal.

Memphis, though, is also a reminder that all design movements need to be questioned to keep them at the edge. The great design project of the 20th century, modernism, was clearly in need of a kick by the 1980s. This is what American postmodernism also tried to do, but it had all the cultural sophistication of Beavis and Butthead. Memphis was at least a clever clown.

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