It's funny how an image like this can give you a right hauntological frisson....
But at the time, it would have just been part of the dreary everydayness of the era (that dingy orange).... graphic with-it-ness reaching the mainstream and becoming mundane.... unremarkable, unnoticed...
But there are design scholars and archivists and imagery collectors who love the Sainsbury packaging, see it as an outpost of popular modernism
And they're not wrong
Selection of Sainsbury delights below and the growing official archive here
As pointed out in the comments, there's been a book of this stuff out for over a decade now, the brainchild of one Jonny Trunk
Some sample pages
9 comments:
The correct postmodern thing to do would be for Sainsburys to reuse these designs, as I would guess that many of these products are still extant (they definitely still make their own cornflakes).
The limited edition Sainsburys Hauntological Range.
Didn't know they used to run hostels though. It's a bit like English Electric, who used to make fridges, toasters, and supersonic jet aircraft.
My example of that - surprising "brand extensions" - is when I was traveling somewhere in the provinces and I saw a sign for Co-Op funeral services. I had thought of it a supermarket chain - Green Shield stamps, own brand biscuits and the rest. But it makes sense - bereavement can be financially devastating for the survivors, so a decent budget-price funeral is a great thing to offer. An extension of the original idealistic raison d'etre of the co-operative movement.
Re. hotels. In Andy Beckett's great book on the 1970s, there's a thing about Jack Jones's vision for trade unions - I believe he got the TUC, or maybe it was the TGWU, to build its own hotel in Brighton, with special rates for trade union members. Maybe there was a whole chain of hotels, I can't remember. He had a whole thing about promoting relaxation and creating leisure centres for workers.
These are beautiful. I wonder if the design on the onion slices is supposed to be tears, as in the onion chopping side effect
Didn’t Jonny Trunk do a whole book of this stuff?
These are great.
That is an amazing trajectory, that starts with Malevich and El Lissitzky inventing Suprematism in the years immediately before and after the Russian Revolution, imagining entirely new ways of seeing and living in the world, and ends with the Sainsbury's biscuit assortment.
Jonny Trunk did a whole book of record shop bags - the plastic carrier bags with the shop's name on. Lord alone knows how he got hold of them - did people keep them? Did he keep them? I guess there were so many independently owned record shops once - one in every reasonable size town.
He also did a book of library music covers, with Julian House contributing an afterword. Wonderful book to flick through.
The Sainsbury designs are wonderful - I am wondering how people felt about them at the time.
Did they have admirers in the design community?
Ordinary folk, I should imagine barely noticed them. It was just part of the generalized look of the time.
It's like a lot of this stuff - it's unremarkable right up until the point it disappears, or perhaps some years after that.
Some years ago I got a nostalgic frisson over the sudden memory of those things they used to have in libraries on the front counter as you took your book to borrow up - it would take a photostat of the first page and your library card. Bulky scientific looking devices that made a whirring sound as I recall.
He definitely did also do a book of Sainsbury’s Own Brand designs. I’ve got a copy. It’s great.
Own Label: Sainsbury's Design Studio 1962-1977.
On Fuel, the same publisher that did the Library sleeves book. Came out 2011. How did I miss that?
I also missed this other Jonny Trunk effort: Wrapper's Delight, from just a few years ago.
"Compiled by famed nostalgia enthusiast Jonny Trunk (owner of record label Trunk Records, and author of The Music Library, Own Label and Wobbly Sounds), and with a foreword by Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, Wrappers Delight is crammed with more than 500 examples of British candy-wrapper designs from the 1960s to the 1980s―the first and only overview of Britain’s drinks and confectionery industry during this period.
"The book catalogs the amazing collection of a man named John Townsend, who collected candy cigarette boxes, wax gum papers, potato-chip bags, soda cans, rock labels, stamps, transfers, coupons, recipe cards, tickets, odd boxes, badges, cards, stickers and much more. All these items have been carefully documented, presented in alphabetical order by manufacturer and reproduced here in the highest quality. Among the confections and manufacturers to be found here are Cider Barrel, Cresta, Tip Top, Pacemakers, Lollygobblechocbomb, Kung Fueys, Fizz Bang, UFO sweet cigarettes and other TV tie-ins, Furry Friends and Fingammies."
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