LEADER OF THE PACK

A travelling show celebrates pioneering German luggage brand Rimowa's 125 years in business

- JACK MOSS

A new travelling exhibition, 'Seit 1898', filled with 'living artefacts', celebrates 125 years since the founding of Rimowa in Cologne, the German city the luggage brand continues to call home more than a century on.

"These are far from museum objects,' says Rimowa CEO Hugues Bonnet-Masimbert at the exhibition's first stop in Tokyo, where, in June, it occupied Jing Harajuku, a glass-walled gallery space close to the district's busy metro station. This is not to say that they're not precious; rather that many of the objects have been donated by those who use Rimowa cases daily, including a phalanx of stars from Pharrell Williams to LeBron James. The exhibition's next stop is New York, then Cologne, with possible further stops still in the works - cases will then 'return to their owners and go back to their lives.

The exhibition's climax is a display of cases from notable clients that span the fictional (an aluminium case emblazoned with the face of Emily in Paris' outré couturier Pierre Cadault, for the faux 'collaboration' depicted in the Netflix show), the surreal (a clear carry-on used by artist Takashi Murakami, stuffed with soft toy versions of his signature cartoon flower motif) and the heavily customised (musician Patti Smith's is covered with studio stickers). Other cases are variously battered or scuffed, marks of wear that Bonnet-Masimbert says only attest to their status as lifelong travelling companions.