Exclusive: Rimowa and Off-White Are Releasing a New Luggage Collection

Now that Virgil Abloh is a designer—as in, a streetwear upstart and the head of one of the world’s biggest fashion houses, Louis Vuitton—his new thing seems to be getting you to be one as well. Abloh’s latest sneakers with Nike, rolled out under the marketing concept of #readymadeoffwhite, come in stark white; buyers are encouraged to doodle on the blank canvas, or dump them in tie-dye. He launched a workshop to go along with those shoes, too, to teach kids about how they were put together. “If that would've been available for me as a 17-year-old…I might not even have had to go to college,” he told me recently. “I might've thought that I could've been a designer way sooner in my life.”

But that principle of making the consumer the designer is clearest in Abloh’s collaboration with Rimowa. His transparent suitcases, first released over the summer, force customers to artfully sort the guts of their suitcases—the shirts, underwear, and toiletries you haphazardly throw into the bag are now on display for everyone to see. After the release of his first collaboration with the 120-year-old hard-goods brand, Abloh told Business of Fashion, “It’s like 3.0 of personalization. It’s not just putting your initials on it but allowing another layer to come in play.” Abloh, for what it’s worth, likes to put a bag from retailer Dover Street Market inside his. As most Abloh-blessed items do, the first collection of suitcases sold out Concorde-fast. But now Abloh and Rimowa are releasing another collection together—yet another new set of luggage for globe-trotting hypebeasts the world over.

Together Abloh and Rimowa will continue to put out transparent cases that come with either black or white finishes, with a luggage belt thrown into the mix. A third bag with the words PERSONAL and BELONGINGS on it will also release online at a date that’s TBD. (If that one sounds familiar, it’s because Rimowa president and CEO Alexandre Arnault premiered it on his personal Instagram last year.)

Rimowa is a prime example of how our collab-crazy moment is spilling out into all nooks and crannies of fashion and luxury goods. Lots of luggage brands are pairing with athletes or influencers, but Rimowa’s collaborations are a notch above that. Earlier this year, it released a red-hot (almost literally) set of luggage with streetwear brand Supreme and worked with Fendi before that. The collaboration with Off-White was similarly successful—pieces of the luggage are still selling for almost $4,000 on resale sites after retailing for just over a grand.

The pot sweetener this time around is that Abloh is building out a physical space where he’ll debut the collection, at streetwear-focused festival Hypefest, happening in New York this weekend. The installation turns something universally loathed—the Uber-delaying luggage carousel—into a runway for his new Rimowa pieces. The functioning conveyor belt will cycle luggage bags stuffed by Abloh himself. (The press release refers to it as an “exhibit,” titled “SEE THROUGH.”) There will also be 100 bags of each colorway available for festival attendees to pre-order. The rest of the cases will release at Rimowa’s site on October 12.

That Abloh is debuting the new collection with one of his “art” projects makes sense. “You become a performance-art piece just by using the thing,” he said of his first Rimowa collaboration. But we can explain Rimowa x Off-White in simpler terms: This isn’t an art project so much as an exercise in problem-solving for Abloh. The man famously spends large chunks of the year in and out of airports—he’s turned the airport selfie into something cool, and he’s done the same to business travel. Now he’s trying to help others travel as stylishly as he does.

A previous version of this story mistakenly referred to the retail price of the original Off-White x Rimowa bags as under a grand. They were $1,200.

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