Who said design had to be serious? Italian Seletti made its international breakthrough as a design company with monkey lamps by artist Marcantonio Raimondi Malerba and porcelain cups that looked like paper cups.

With a playful attitude to design – but also with collaborations with star designers like Studio Job and Fabio Novembre – the Italian company is leading a wave of kitsch.

The history of Italian fin-kitsch goes back more than 40 years, to 1981, when the Memphis Group exploded into the design world. The young design group's founder, Ettore Sottsass, calls their design "more colorful, more playful, more optimistic, more humorous." Black and white patterns are mixed with more brightly colored shapes and motifs taken from a comic book from the 1950s.

Here in the north we were long afraid of kitsch. The Danes are a little less and perhaps today there are design companies like Hay in the country, a company that makes a living from small, colorful, playful objects. The horse lamp by the Swedish design duo Front is another example, as are colorful design objects from the Swedish Hem that take the mind straight to Memphis.