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 Shanghai, before finally returning to Cologne; afterwards, cases will then ‘return to their owners and go back to their lives’.
