MEMPHIS ON MY MIND

Known only through a handful of photos, Karl Lagerfeld’s Monaco apartment has long been the stuff of design mythology. In 1981, on moving from an 18th-century Paris mansion to Gio Ponti’s Roccabella building in Monte Carlo, the fashion designer sought a radical change by asking Memphis, the design and architecture collective that had just been founded by Ettore Sottsass, to furnish his new home. “It was love at first sight,” Lagerfeld later recalled about Memphis’s colorful, irreverent designs. Since he had never lived in a contemporary building, he was unsure how to decorate his new pad. “I wanted it all modern, and instantly thought that Memphis would be the Art Deco of the 80s. I was right. And what I like about all the Memphis stuff is its humor.”

At the same time that Lagerfeld was going mad for Memphis, the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli, then just a boy of ten, was also exposed to the collective’s tongue-in-cheek iconoclasm, which he encountered in his native Brescia. “Though not rich or collectors, my parents were both quite sophisticated design connoisseurs,” he explains. “Most of their heroes — everyone from Marcel Breuer and Eileen Gray to Achille Castiglioni and Enzo Mari — were on their way to becoming classics, whereas Memphis represented a new sensibility for the 80s.” Since his parents were fans, he picked up on this change in the Zeitgeist. “I remember going to a boutique that sold Japanese brands like Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto. It had this beautiful Memphis table on which the owners displayed their most precious things,” he recalls. “For a provincial kid, that was a language that connected dots, even if at the time I didn’t know that [Memphis member] Shiro Kuramata was designing stores for Issey Miyake. I felt that somehow this was my place.” For Italians back then, he continues, ground down by the anni di piombo (the period of political terrorism that began in the late 60s), “Memphis was pure joy,” a liberating breath of insouciance. This feeling of connection would only grow stronger when, freshly graduated from London’s Central St. Martins, Vezzoli moved to Milan in the early 90s, attending weekly dinners held by Eleonara Gardini, then head of Venini, at which Sottsass was a regular. “Ettore was the friendliest and most supportive member of that group. I was in love with him!” the artist told door magazine.

With his current exhibition, KARL GOES TO MEMPHIS: Tribute to a Historic Encounter in Monte Carlo, Vezzoli brings together several of his obsessions. At Almine Rech’s Monaco gallery — which just happens to occupy the former premises of Sotheby’s, where Lagerfeld auctioned off his Memphis collection in 1991 — the artist, in collaboration with the current Memphis Milano head, Charley Vezza, has carefully recreated the ambiance of the Roccabella apartment. New editions of the majority of the pieces Lagerfeld owned take their place in a space entirely redecorated to mimic the moody gray environment in which the fashion designer set off his multi-hued furniture. With this installation, Vezzoli addresses ideas he has questioned throughout his oeuvre — “good taste,” authenticity, and celebrity — through the facsimile of a lost and irreverently brash interior that was created for a man whose fame far exceeded that of many of the brands he designed for.

“For people of my generation, with my sexual orientation, Memphis was the most liberating thing that had happened to Italian culture for a long time,” Vezzoli told door. And in the same way, KARL GOES TO MEMPHIS seems to show us a far more liberated Lagerfeld than the image the designer chose to project in later life. Like his celebration of 1970s Italian television (TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai, Fondazione Prada, 2017), or his tribute to the Fun Palace spirit of the Centre Pompidou on the occasion of the building’s 40th birthday, Vezzoli is once again returning to that paradise lost that was the 70s and early 80s, the one he just missed because he was born too late, that party for which many feel regret since it took place at a time when it was still permissible to believe that tomorrow would be better than today. But Vezzoli’s mordant irony — recreating Lagerfeld’s pad in the place where he sold it all off; putting on a “fake news” show of reproductions — brings us crashing back into our messy present.