December 11th, 1980. A group of radical designers and architects—both Italian and international—gathered in an apartment on Via San Galdino in Milan. Among them were Matteo Thun, Aldo Cibic, Martine Bedin, Marco Zanini, and Michele De Lucchi—all in their twenties. Hosting them was Ettore Sottsass, the 63-year-old titan of Italian design and architecture. 

What united this unlikely crew was a shared boredom with the rules of modernist design—practicality over emotion—and on the table was Sottsass’s plan to create a new line of furniture for his longtime carpenter friend, Renzo Brugola. But something shifted. As Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” played on repeat, the group decided to break with canon—and start their own movement.