The most recent and best-known of Italian 'new wave' design groups. Founded in 1981 in Milan by Ettore Sottsass with Andrea Branzi, Michele De Iacchi (b. 1951) Matteo Thun (b. 1952) , Marco Zanini (b. 1954), Natalie Du Pasquier (b. 1957) and others. Non-Italians, notably Michael Graves and Hans Hollein, occasionally contributed designs. Anarchic and disruptive, Memphis is both anti-design and anti-ideology, despite much use of structuralist, semiologist and other fashionable jargons in its promotional literature. It flaunts the rejection of 'good form' and 'good taste' with a lavish use of gaudily colored plastic laminates redolent of suburban McDonald's or of nursery foods and sweets. It has been described as the ultimate fruit-salad in design, the 1981 Casablanca cupboard in HPL print laminate by Sottsass being its paradigmatic masterpiece. Besides furniture, the group has produced fabrics, ceramics, silver and glass.