The Blue Beyond: RIMOWA and the Alchemy of Ultramarine.
There was a time when finding the right blue required a journey of several thousand kilometres.
Long before colour became a matter of personal preference, it was a question of geology, trade and considerable expense. The most coveted blues were extracted from stone, ground by hand and transported across continents alongside spices, silk and other luxuries. Beauty had its supply chains long before anyone thought to give them a name.
It is an unexpectedly rich place for RIMOWA to begin a story about luggage.
Its new Umber & Ultramarine collection draws on two pigments with rather different histories, reimagining the Essential luggage and Groove accessories in colours that have occupied artists for centuries. The accompanying film, starring English actor Joe Alwyn, follows a young painter moving into an empty studio. Furniture remains wrapped, boxes await opening and the room has yet to acquire a personality. His immediate concern, however, is finding the perfect blue. One suspects the furniture can wait.
Ultramarine takes its name from the medieval Latin ultramarinus, meaning beyond the sea. Made from lapis lazuli, a semiprecious stone mined principally in what is now Afghanistan, the pigment travelled west through the trading networks connecting Central Asia with Europe. Turning the stone into paint required painstaking refinement, making the finest blue an extravagance reserved for those able to afford it.
In fifteenth-century Italy, the painter Cennino Cennini devoted considerable attention to its preparation in Il Libro dell'Arte. Ultramarine was prized above almost every other pigment, and its use was sometimes negotiated separately between artist and patron. In religious paintings, it frequently adorned the Virgin Mary's robes, its brilliance announcing both devotion and considerable expenditure. Even holiness, it seems, had a materials budget.
Umber was a more terrestrial affair. Derived from naturally occurring iron and manganese oxides, it offered painters a range of earthy browns, from warm ochre-like tones to darker shades. Its name is associated with the Latin umbra, meaning shadow. Less an object of desire than an indispensable collaborator, it gave paintings depth and atmosphere. Caravaggio understood that darkness could have its own architecture; Rembrandt knew that brown was anything but an absence of colour.
One pigment arrived from elsewhere; the other seemed to belong to the ground beneath one's feet. Yet both carried the geography of their origins into the artist's studio. Colour, in this sense, was never merely visual. It was material history made visible.
In RIMOWA's film, the painter's search gradually becomes an exercise in absorption. Blue moves from the palette to the hand, from the hand into the room. It begins to alter the way he sees his surroundings. There is something faintly comic about the moment an obsession takes possession of its owner.
Maggie Nelson understood this peculiar intimacy in Bluets, her fragmentary meditation on colour, desire and loss. Blue becomes a private language, a fixation that resists explanation. The painter faces a similar predicament. He may reproduce a particular shade, but can he recover the one he remembers? And if he does, will it still be the same?
Perhaps this is the difficulty with perfection. It tends to disappear when approached too directly.
The studio offers another way into the story. Initially anonymous, it gradually becomes an extension of its occupant. Unpacking is a form of composition; objects acquire meaning through their arrangement and use. Walter Benjamin, in his writings on collecting, explored the private worlds people construct around possessions. Removed from the anonymity of the marketplace, an object gathers associations and acquires a history of its own. A suitcase, in its own modest way, does much the same.
RIMOWA's Essential range retains its familiar engineering in the new colours: lightweight polycarbonate construction, telescopic handle, Multiwheel system, TSA-approved locks and Flex Divider interior. The finish extends across the handle, zipper and logo badge, giving the cases a considered visual coherence. A lifetime guarantee speaks to a rather different relationship with ownership in a culture accustomed to replacing things before they have acquired much of a history.
The Groove collection takes the palette into more intimate territory. The Cross-Body Bag Small and Zipped Pouch appear in Umber, while the Mini Shopping Bag arrives in both colours. Crafted in Italy from smooth calfskin, the latter is a quieter expression of mobility, suited as much to the daily passage through a city as to the grander business of departure.
There is a not unappealing reversal here.
Ultramarine once travelled across continents as raw material before becoming something precious. Now its history informs the vessel itself. The suitcase carries the memory of a journey made centuries before its own.
Baudelaire's flâneur might have appreciated the incongruity. He found poetry in the commerce, crowds and fleeting encounters of modern life, recognising that beauty often resides in things overlooked. A painter alone in a half-furnished room, a hand stained with pigment, a suitcase passing through an airport: None is inherently extraordinary. Attention makes the difference.
Perhaps that is the more interesting proposition behind Umber & Ultramarine. Not that luggage can become art, or that a new colour might transform the experience of travel, but that the objects accompanying us influence how we inhabit the world. A room becomes a studio through use; a suitcase acquires character through miles; a colour becomes personal through the time spent looking at it.
The painter may eventually find his blue. Whether it is the right one is another matter. Somewhere, beyond the studio, another stone is being quarried, another pigment prepared, another traveller is closing a case.
The perfect colour, like the perfect destination, has a habit of remaining just beyond reach. Perhaps the pleasure was never in finding it, but in having a reason to set off.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of Rimowa.
