RIMOWA & MAISON MARGIELA WHITEWASH THE CLASSIC CABIN

Anyone who has owned a RIMOWA suitcase for long enough will know that the aluminium never stays pristine for very long, and that the dents and scuffs it collects on baggage carousels slowly become part of the reason people hold on to it, which is the idea that has brought the German luggage maker together with Maison Margiela for a limited-edition set made up of the Classic Cabin and an enlarged version of the 5AC bag.

The two pieces have been designed to travel as a pair, with each one borrowing from the other, so that RIMOWA’s ridged grooves now run across the leather of the bag while every piece in the set has been painted by hand in Bianchetto, the chalky white overpaint that Margiela has used since its earliest days.

The two signatures come from very different places. RIMOWA’s grooves first appeared on an aluminium case in 1950, taken from the aviation industry that shaped so much of the brand’s early design, whereas Bianchetto goes back to 1988, when Martin Margiela painted all of the furniture in his first studio white and then left the paint to crack and flake as the room was used. Brought onto a suitcase, the thinking is that the paint will wear away at its own pace as the case is pulled through airports and hotel lobbies, so that after a few years of travel no two sets will look quite the same.

The Classic Cabin keeps most of its Margiela thinking on the inside, where the usual lining has been replaced with a white one trimmed in leather and finished with exposed stitching and overlocked seams, so that opening the case feels a little like looking at a garment that has been turned inside out. It refers back to the 5AC, whose lining has always spilled out past the edge of its leather body, and the same idea turns up on the aluminium logo badge, which has been tacked down with the four white stitches that usually hold a Margiela label in place. Underneath the paint it is still the anodised aluminium case RIMOWA makes at its factory in Cologne, with its Multiwheel system and TSA-approved locks left as they were.

The 5AC XL is where the collaboration feels most technically ambitious, since its grooves have been pressed into the leather using a high-frequency process that shapes the pattern in three dimensions without a single stitch. It comes with a cross-body strap for carrying on its own and a pair of removable leather loops that fix it to the top of the Classic Cabin, where the grooves of both pieces line up into one continuous surface, and each piece carries a leather tag that merges RIMOWA’s address tag with the small bell Margiela hangs from its keys.

The campaign, directed and photographed by Dexter Lander, treats Bianchetto as something closer to an accident, with white paint sprayed across a Haussmannian apartment until the luggage and the antique furniture around it are covered, leaving the outlines of the bag and suitcase printed on the patterned wallpaper in the places the paint never reached.

The obvious tension in the project is that a set built around marks earned over years of travel arrives already looking aged, and at €3,200 for the suitcase and €3,600 for the bag, many of the people buying both will be more likely to keep them in a wardrobe than to find out how the paint survives a luggage belt. The suitcase also changes less than it might have, with its most considered ideas tucked away in the lining, which leaves the 5AC XL as the piece that has been most genuinely rethought by the two houses working together.

The RIMOWA x Maison Margiela Classic Cabin and 5AC XL go on sale on 19 November in selected RIMOWA and Maison Margiela stores and online through both brands’ websites.