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A suitcase is usually supposed to behave. It should be polished, durable, discreet, and expensive in a way that whispers rather than shouts. Slawn, naturally, has other ideas.
The Nigerian-born, London-based artist has teased a new collaboration with RIMOWA under the name “SLIMOWA”, taking the German luggage house’s instantly recognisable grooved aluminium suitcases and covering them in his own chaotic visual language. Think spray-painted portraits, cartoonish faces, primary colours, rough marks, and the feeling that someone has dragged luxury through a very good bad decision.
That collision is the whole point. RIMOWA represents precision, travel discipline, and object permanence: aluminium shells built to move through airports like status symbols with wheels. Slawn’s work, by contrast, thrives on interruption. It scribbles over authority. It makes refinement feel unstable. It treats the clean surface as an invitation to misbehave.
The project appears to transform RIMOWA’s luggage into something closer to a portable artwork than a traditional travel object. The grooved metal becomes a canvas, with Slawn’s signature frowning characters and distorted figures breaking across the surface. The suitcase is still functional, but now it carries a different kind of baggage: humour, ego, satire, and the messy thrill of personal mark-making.
There is also a neat irony in the name. SLIMOWA sounds like both a collaboration and a joke at luxury’s expense, which is exactly where Slawn often feels most at home. His work has long played with the codes of value, hype, and cultural status, turning objects into visual pranks that somehow become even more desirable because they refuse to be polite.
Release details and pricing have not yet been fully confirmed, but the pieces are expected to land as highly limited objects, possibly closer to collectibles than standard luggage.
Photos: OLAOLU SLAWN