I don’t fault the designers for exploring a new space – even if all they created was a catalog of counterexamples, that’s still valuable. Most eighties postmodernism in the Memphis / Venturi / Terry Farrell vein is not stuff I’d pay money for, but there are interesting design thoughts there.
The problem is it’s all very academic, with layers of irony, if not actual sarcasm, that translate badly into mainstream fashions. When everyone buys knockoffs of Robin Day’s plastic stacking chair, that works out OK because the original design is earnestly meant to be a good, practical chair. But if knockoff Sottsass chairs become fashionable, you just end up with a world of weird bad chairs that everyone can’t wait to see the back of, and aggravated class tensions, and just the 1980s generally.
