In December 1981 the 65-year-old Italian architect Ettore Sottsass staged a furniture show in Milan. The pieces included a bookcase shaped like a banana (Carlton), a chair with triangles and waves stuck on, and rugs covered in spots and squiggles — the group named itself the 'Memphis Group,' after a Bob Dylan song they played on repeat that night.

The backdrop: through the 1980s the West was being completely swamped by the legacy of Swiss Style + the Bauhaus. Everything was 'rational, restrained, functional' — beautiful, but bored to death. Sottsass and his partners' answer was: 'Then we'll make the least rational things possible.'

They turned the theory of postmodernism into furniture you could sit on: explicitly rejecting function-first, explicitly embracing decoration, explicitly letting colour and pattern fight each other. Karl Lagerfeld filled an entire apartment with Memphis furniture; David Bowie was a major collector.

The movement lasted only six years — but its DNA came back to life in the title sequence of 1990s Saved by the Bell, in every piece of Lisa Frank stationery, and in the Instagram 'Geometric Memphis Pattern' wave from 2017 on. Every time minimalism gets too dull, Memphis comes back to give it a kick.