The term first appeared in Italy in the eighties of the twentieth century. Its emergence was due to the formation of two design groups with the names Alchemy and Memphis. The first one had Mendini and Guerriero, and the second Sottsass, who challenged the existing design of a functional character. In today’s world this would be called a patent on a creative idea. The works of art that were increasingly created by these designers (and they were engaged in interior design and furniture design at the beginning of their creative development) began to differ from the pragmatic products of design work that were common at the time.
The new style began to stand out from what it had been before with the following features:
- Original color and light combinations
- Creation of objects in different stylistic directions
- Mixing styles in the development of a single product
- Using exotic directions in the work, which were previously not used in design at all
- Working with unusual images
- Use of unusual materials
- High-quality creation of the composition as a whole
- Using manual work to a greater extent in the creation of new objects
Based on the foregoing, you would think that art design can come to taste a very small circle of individuals, which includes aesthetes and refined representatives of secular society. But that’s not the case at all. People have embraced this new approach to design and loved it. Almost everyone found objects created by human hands, combining subtle intonations and strong feelings, attractive. People, faced with the works of designers who applied such direction in their activity, dealt with art as such, and therefore experienced genuine emotions. And people like that.