With the luxury luggage brand Rimowa, the story is: there is no story. There's simply a beautiful, functional product.
OK, there's one fable, but even that remains unconfirmed. In the early 1930s, Görtz & Morszeck (as Rimowa was then called) was entering its fourth decade when the company's factory in Cologne suffered a fire that devoured all its materials bar one: a light grey, fire-resistant aluminium. When Paul Morszeck's son Richard took over the business in 1937, he renamed it after himself, chard rszeck renzeichen (trademark), and launched the label's first aluminium suitcase. This one did not possess the now-distinct industrial-looking grooves, but it was the start of the iconography we know today. And if the story
