Coming out in the wash

Tel: 020 7403 6933
www.designmuseum.com
Tube: Tower Hill

With swirling psychedelic colours and zany slogans, soap powder packaging transforms the banal into something fabulous. Its pop appeal has inspired everything from record sleeves to clothing to club flyers and this new exhibition stacks up an impressive array of boxes --a kind of international graphic language spanning 170 years. Besides beautifully kitsch visuals, what really enhances this exhibition is curator Dr Lorraine Gamman's contention that such packaging conveys repression: 'What was missing was dirt and sex,' she says.

Scratch the squeakily wholesome surface and there's some grubby truths here: the imperial ideals of old brands such as Fairbank's Gold Dust (depicting 'piccaninny' children scrubbing floors and laundry) against 'the Great Unwashed', hilarious smear campaigns (manufacturers Proctor And Gamble were accused of Satanism in the 1980s), and the Ivory Snow 'madonna' who became an infamous porn star. There's specially commissioned work from new designers, including Nick Crosbie's clothes pegs and bags fashioned from recycled soap boxes, and heady surmising from creatives such as Will Self ('Consider the washing tablet bag,' he writes. 'When freighted with its two rectilinear tablets, is it not a virtual simulacrum of the scrotum?') and Suzanne Moore, observing: 'In our obsession with cleansing ourselves, we refuse to see that we actually make the world a dirtier place.'

Weird, witty and frequently revealing - go see what really comes out in the wash.