What the work is
Karim Rashid’s project archive dates the Garbo wastebasket for Umbra to 1996. Garbo should be distinguished from the smaller Garbino that followed.
How it was made
Umbra’s account describes Rashid proposing a sculptural, open-top bin. It also records a practical adjustment: Garbo sold, but its size was unsuitable for many rooms, prompting the smaller version.
Hepworth places Garbo inside a larger turn in the company’s business. By the late 1980s, he writes, Umbra had moved beyond paper window shades, which he calls too niche and difficult for retailers to stock and display, and was finding success with simpler items such as place mats and clocks. The trash can began with a purchase in Paris: in a Les Halles toy store he noticed a small multi-coloured swing-top bin, bought one and traced it to a Japanese plastic company. His reasoning, as he gives it, was that the only options on the market were industrial swing or push cans and very plain kitchen open-top cans, and that a bin which is part of the room might as well enhance the decor rather than be hidden.
His own team’s first reaction, he recalls, was “not useful, too small”. Samples shown at the New York Gift Show drew a lot of attention, and Umbra ordered a few hundred. The first step was a larger swing-top can in plastic, which Umbra could not afford to tool alone. It split the cost of the mold 50/50 with its German importer, who found a toolmaker and molder in Northern Italy. Only after that, Hepworth says, did he and Paul Rowan meet Karim Rashid in Toronto. He writes that Rashid had just closed his clothing line and was working as a DJ, and that he came up with an open-top sculptural can that the company named Garbo.
What works
The design gives an overlooked household object a deliberate visual presence. Its open top keeps the basic action direct, while the shape makes the bin something to place in a room rather than automatically conceal.
What does not
Umbra’s own history identifies the important limitation: scale. An attractive object can still fail to fit the spaces where people need it, and changing its size may matter more than changing its styling.
What it influenced
The direct development documented here is Garbino. The two products make a useful comparison between an initial formal proposition and a subsequent adjustment to everyday placement.
Umbra’s account also gives Garbino’s standing: Hepworth says it was and still is a huge hit, and says it is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That is the company’s claim in its own retelling, and this brief has not checked it against the museum. The same post says many of Umbra’s later trash cans have been copied, and describes the company’s subsequent work with metal and other materials.
Is it worth your time
Worth studying as a pair. Compare capacity, footprint and the relationship to nearby furniture. The lesson is concrete: a product’s character and its usefulness have to survive the dimensions of an actual room.
