The plastic laundry basket. Celebrated through a Golden Compass award and Incredibles 2

The object of the day today is double, pretty much the same, and in both cases it doesn’t exist anymore – more or less.

To see one of the two live takes a trip to the Kartell Museum in Noviglio, near Milan. And once there, you must look for the case that contains Tinozza rettangolare KS 1065 (rectangular bucket) designed by Gino Colombini.

The reason why I'm talking about it is because of the second basket. Which, as you can see by the main picture, has a completely perforated body, unlike KS (below): meaning it could only be used to collect dirty clothes, but not to hand wash them. And not only, like the 1957 Golden Compass winner KS, does it not exist anymore, it has never been sold in any household goods store, much less on view in a design museum. That’s because it is an accessory designed specifically for the imaginary world of the Disney•Pixar Incredibles 2, released worldwide between summer and fall.

Although different in design, with a tangible existence issue, and with a time gap of sixty years between them, KS and that ordinary superhero basket are in truth contemporaries.

Incredibles 2 is indeed a 2018 production, but the story it depicts is set in 1960s America. Putting them close to one another, despite an ocean that separates them, is to remind us how much one is related to the technical innovation to the other. But eventually both are a testament of a great industrial moment in time: the plastic revolution. KS 1065 for being forever an “example of a tangible innovation in the field of plastics, with an improved resistant structure due to a new edge made in a much more rigid material than the one utilized for the bucket cavity”; and the superhero’s bucket for being instead – as shown in the fictional 1962, in the real Cuban missile crisis one, and today – the common item for dirty clothes as obvious as a child’s drawing, a basic blueprint for millions of buckets around the world.

Far from being obsolete, if even the ones gifted with super powers are forced to use one to collect their superhero suits tossed around the floor once they are over from saving the Earth...