The Latest Home Trend Is Summer’s Answer to Cottagecore (And It’s a Minimalist’s Dream)

If the patchwork quilts, toadstool knickknacks and floral wallpaper that embodied Cottagecore felt a little too rustic for your tastes, one of summer’s biggest home trends will feel like a breath of fresh air. It’s bold, it’s sleek—and it’s a total 180 from the Hobbit-meets-Folklore aesthetic that dominated 2020. It’s the Memphis Squiggle 2.0.

For the uninitiated, the Memphis movement has nothing to do with the city; “Memphis” is the name of an ‘80s design collective that favored squiggly shapes and bold colors—the more outrageous, the better. It was a sharp turn away from years of oh-so-serious modernism, an aesthetic that seems to influence every aspect of pop culture, from Espirit stores to the opening credits of Rocko’s Modern Life. (Just take one look at Memphis founder Ettore Sottsass’s Bacterio print and not picture the neon, squiggly backdrop to the show.)

Design sites have been heralding Memphis’s comeback just about every year since 2017—when terrazzo took over—but it’s the squiggly décor, specifically, that seems to be gripping the mainstream right now. We saw glimmers of it pre-pandemic, when celebrities and high-end shops started showcasing Sottsass’s Ultrafragola mirror. Then, we went into lockdown, and for most of us, as much as we wanted to update our homes, an $11,000 mirror just wasn’t in the cards. But its look took hold, and before long, squiggly shapes in bright, punchy colors started appearing everywhere. Seriously—searches for “wavy” décor were so popular Etsy named it one of the top home trends of 2021, citing a 5,296 percent increase in searches for wavy mirrors.