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Robert Opie saves the wrappers and boxes the rest of us discard – and they now fill a museum
In our consumer society we have become used to the throwaway nature of many products. How many of the items in your local shopping mall existed 20 years ago? What did they look like? And what will become of them in another 20 years? These were the type of questions that struck Robert Opie, the man behind London’s Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising, when he was just 16.
He remembers the moment well: it was a Sunday evening in 1963 and he had just bought some Munchies sweets. “It dawned on me that if I threw this Munchies packet away I would never see it again because the design, the price and everything else would change about it,” he says. “I realised this was an interesting part of our society that was not being recorded.”
Opie comes from a family of collectors – his parents collected folk tales and children’s literature – and he was an avid stamp collector as a child. But he soon realised that he would never be able to compete with established philatelists, so he branched into postal stationery, stamp booklets and greeting telegrams. As a teenager he gave a lecture to the Royal Philatelic Society called “A Load of Rubbish”, which he illustrated with different varieties of baked beans tins. “I was turning the subject on its head: a stamp that you stick on an envelope is as much a part of our throwaway society as a Heinz baked beans label.”
At first, Opie’s collection was made up of contemporary objects, but slowly he started to go back in time, hunting at the famous Portobello Market, near to where his museum now stands, for things that previous generations had thrown away. “I like to collect one subject, but then that’s connected to another subject, and then you want to put that into a wider context. So I look outwards all the time to see how one thing gets inspiration from another.”
His collection has grown to around half a million items, 12,000 of which are on show in the museum – everything from soap boxes and vacuum cleaners to television sets and, of course, sweet wrappers. “It’s been like putting some vast, neverending jigsaw puzzle together,” Opie says. “Half the time you don’t know what you’re looking for ; you’re always discovering new brands that you never dreamt existed.” But all the effort is worth it: “I get a huge amount of enjoyment out of watching other people see things that they haven’t seen for years and understanding how life has evolved and how we’ve changed as a society.”
www.museumofbrands.com Omer Ali; portrait Leon Csernohlavek
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