Rimowa Original

The Original is a box of anodised aluminium, silver in its plainest form, its two shells pressed with evenly spaced parallel ribs that run around the case like the skin of an old aeroplane. That is where they came from. The grooves borrow the corrugated metal of Junkers aircraft, which used ribbing to stiffen thin aluminium; on a suitcase they do the same, letting a light sheet keep its shape. The case opens in two halves and today rolls on Rimowa's Multiwheel system, with a telescopic handle; the cabin size measures 55 by 40 by 23 centimetres.

Rimowa began in 1898 as Paul Morszeck's trunk-making workshop in Cologne, working in wood, leather and cardboard. His son Richard, who gave the firm its name from the first syllables of his own and the German for trademark, built an aluminium suitcase in 1937, still smooth-sided. During the war the factory and its stock were destroyed, all but the aluminium; Rimowa afterwards made cases in light metal alone, and in 1950 added the grooves.

They did not catch on at once. Dieter Morszeck later recalled that five years after the war women in particular disliked a case that looked like the corrugated-iron huts of the hungry years. The grooved case found its following first with tropical travellers and lovers of the technical, then with photographers and advertising people: the company made polycarbonate cases moulded with the same ribs from 2000, but the aluminium case never left the range, sold for decades as Topas.

LVMH bought control of Rimowa in 2016-17, and in 2018, with a new identity for the company's hundred-and-twentieth year, Topas became the Original. The grooves are protected as a trademark. A Stiftung Warentest trial in 2016 rated the aluminium case poorly against Rimowa's own polycarbonate, faulting its weight and the dents left by a drop test. Some owners, Morszeck has said, will not part with an old case because its dents carry the memory of their journeys.