This paper is concerned with a novel event-triggered sliding mode variable structure control (ESMC) scheme to achieve robust stabilization of memristive systems (MSs). First, a memory-based sliding surface, including the past and the current information of the system states, is introduced. Two switching gain matrices of such kinds of switching surfaces, which satisfy the guaranteed cost performance of the sliding reduced order dynamics, are achieved by employing linear matrix inequality techniques. Second, a sliding mode controller using an event-triggered mechanism is constructed to ensure that the trajectories of the uncertain MS slide towards the proposed memory-based switching hyperplane, and thus, the stabilization of entire MSs is reached. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed results is demonstrated through simulations.