Excess Baggage is the first exhibition of examples from the Paper Bag Archive, the collection of designer Tim Sumner, which boasts the world’s largest archive of paper bags at over 2,500 in total. Sumner, who is creative director of Studio Summon, established the archive to celebrate this most humble of packaging designs.

Once a ubiquitous presence in high street shops across the country, the archive includes examples from the early 1900s to the present day. While once considered ephemeral designs for one-time use, collected together the bags offer a visual history of our consumer culture, shopping habits and leisure destinations.

The exhibition has been specially curated to highlight the evolution of the visual language of various large retail brands, such as Habitat, Debenhams and Selfridges, alongside many shops local to Liverpool, including George Henry Lee, Owen Owen, Lewis’s, Hendersons, Blacklers, the Royal Liver Building and Probe record shop.

Also featured are several bags made for individual brands – from Maynards wine gums and Outspan oranges – and examples designed for a range of museums, galleries and holiday destinations, such as the Barbican Art Gallery, the National Gallery and Legoland.

The exhibition also inevitably features many names that are no longer so familiar to high street shoppers, such as the long-gone Rumbelows and the recently rebranded WHSmith, which arguably possessed one of the best paper-bag deployments of a classic retail logo – its cube mark was designed in 1973 and retired in 1990.

As an extension of his collection, in 2021 Sumner began fundraising a book, To Have & To Hold. While the campaign was unsuccessful, he eventually redesigned the format and, a year later, produced the first in a series of editions which tap into various themes within the archive – the debut issue featuring bags from bookshops. TH&TH is now in its sixth issue and published by Collect Books.

According to Dorothy, the bags in Excess Baggage offer a “nostalgic trip back down the British high street of the last 100 years” and “a reflection of a more innocent design era”. It’s a slice of social history, identity and logo design, and a celebration of a format that certainly still has its place as a recyclable packaging option.

The exhibition is the latest in Dorothy’s Firsts series of exhibitions, supporting debut shows by designers, artists, writers and collectors. Excess Baggage is on until March 27; wearedorothy.com