Luggage Through the Ages
BY CULLEN MURPHY
“BON VOYAGE! Designs for Travel,” 13 which opened late last April at the Smithsonian Institution’s CooperHewitt Museum, in New York City, and which will close in mid-July, is a quiet celebration of an undeservedly neglected enterprise—the development and manufacture of luggage and travel accessories. It acknowledges what we all know: that travel, whether for business or pleasure, has never been easy. But it also points up what we tend to forget: that the evolving needs of a traveling public—needs that may become pressing at times of rapid transition in the means of transport—have generally been satisfied in very short order. Satisfaction has not, of course, been total, but it has been substantial, even as everlarger numbers of travelers have taken to the roads, the rails, and the skies.
That is the premise of the CooperHewitt exhibit. What makes the show entertaining is the variety of the supporting evidence—some 200 pieces in all, including items dating back to medieval times. Some of the artifacts claim a distinguished provenance. Herman Melville customarily traveled with a set of collapsible scales (the better to calculate relative values of foreign specie) and a special drinking glass. Melville’s traveling kit is on display. Charles Dickens is represented by the inkwell he used on forays overseas, General Winfield Scott by the tin hat case that held a favorite bicorne. There are trunks that belonged to England’s George III and to France’s Marie de Medici, and a folding campaign desk built for Russia’s Czar Paul I. The composer Leopold Stokowski rarely ventured abroad without the steamer trunk designed for him by Louis Vuitton. When opened and stood on end— as it is at the Cooper-Hewitt—the trunk reveals two shelves for books, three drawers for musical scores, and a cubbyhole for a metronome. A panel in the trunk’s lid folds down into a desk.
The emphasis in the exhibit is decidedly less on celebrity than it is on ingenuity. It does not really matter who commissioned the elegant eighteenthcentury brass sundial that shines among a half-dozen other timepieces. Engraved with latitudes for fourteen European cities (enabling its owner to determine the hour wherever he was likely to be), it is a handsome, clever, and immensely practical piece of work. So is the seventeenth-century Swedish bedstead, on a sturdy frame, that unfolds out of a footlocker. There is a miniature violin capable of being collapsed into a walking stick (you have to see it). Still more remarkable is a full-sized carriage that can be taken apart readily and packed in three small trunks (not including wheels). The carriage is of the type known as a Tilbury, after the London coach-builder who invented it.
The exhibit encompasses the products of Asian nomads, American Indians, and Renaissance courtiers, as well as those of such specialty concerns as Louis Vuitton (which has underwritten the show), Mark Cross, Asprey, Samsonite, Hartmann, Zero Halliburton, the United States Army, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The displays range from chalice cases and portable Buddhist shrines to doctor‘s bags and tinker’s pigs. Mess kits were an idea whose time came early, and a number of very fine ones are on exhibit. (In its most basic form, which survives to this day, the mess kit consists of a few essential eating utensils, artfully contrived; the more elaborate kind, though scarcely less compact, might contain dinner service for twelve.) There are also many examples of the more familiar forms of luggage—trunks, suitcases, garment bags, and so on. Less carefully presented, these might have cloyed, or at the very least made the museum floor seem like a shop floor. But in fact they tell a story.
The story is told not only through the artful arrangement of displays but also in an exceptionally informative and wellillustrated catalogue. Its contributors include the historian J. G. Links (writing on evolving attitudes toward travel), the industrial designer Ralph Caplan (who reflects on luggage design), and the essayist Paul Fussell (who surveys the social history of transportation). Fussell writes, “In the history of luggage since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the evolution, if that’s the right word, has been from heavyto lightweight, from complex to simple, and from elegant to plain.” That is an accurate summation of a general trend, but it is not all that luggage has to tell us.
THE ORGANIZER OF the exhibit is Deborah Sampson Shinn, a guest curator at the Cooper-Hewitt who has previously worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. I spoke with her not long ago at her office. Shinn explained that the key considerations in developing items for travel are “portability” and “protection.” The trade-off between the two, she said, has governed travel design in every age. It is perhaps the one constant in a sea of variables.
“Several things are always changing,” Shinn said. “One involves the ways we move about. Traveling by horse as opposed to traveling on foot, by carriage instead of by horse, by boat instead of by carriage, by rail instead of by boat, by aircraft instead of by rail—all of this has had consequences for our luggage.” It used to be that manufacturers made trunks with rounded tops and left the hair on the exterior leather. Such “hairon” trunks were meant to be carried on top of coaches. The domed top served a dual purpose: it repelled rainwater and deterred coachmen from attempting to stack the luggage too high. Only with the age of the railway baggage car did trunk tops become flat, for easier storage. At the same time, the railroads brought long-distance travel within the reach of the bourgeoisie: hence the development of hand luggage, such as carpetbags and portmanteaus—necessities for those without servants. British businessmen, with goods to sell as well as clothes to carry, came up with the modern suitcase—a narrow trunk, essentially, but with the handle on one of the long sides instead of on each of the two short sides. Automobiles led to the evolution of another sort of trunk entirely— one that could be affixed, with straps, to the side or back of a vehicle. The trunk was eventually incorporated into the design of the automobile itself. With the advent of air travel, suitcases at first became lighter and slimmer and then, thanks in part to artificial fibers, flexible and hangable. According to the catalogue, no one seems to know whether the typical airliner’s overhead baggage compartment became larger in order to accommodate bigger luggage or whether luggage became larger because the overhead compartment had grown spacious enough to hold it.
“The second factor that affects travel design is fashion,” Shinn said. “We don’t need to carry. around as many costumes as we used to.” For one thing, we no longer dress for dinner, or wear plusfours on the links, or sport “touring outfits” when out for a spin in the Packard. Detachable collars, once the norm, now survive chiefly in formal wear; collar cases are a rarity. (They are still made, however. Swaine, Adeney, Brigg & Sons, Ltd. of London, sells collar cases in bridle hide or pigskin for £89.) Military officers once wore epaulets on their shoulders and cockades on their caps; such plumage required a receptacle. Women used to wear hoop skirts. They traveled with dozens of shoes. A standard “shoe-secrétaire” on exhibit, dating from 1925, provides drawers for thirtysix pairs. Hats were once a big consideration. Men as well as women traveled with lots of them. The interior doughnut-hole space afforded by the spare tire in many early cars was given over to the accommodation of hats. Earlier, trunks and suitcases were often fashioned with a bulge on the side to hold a lady‘s or a gentleman‘s headgear. Hatboxes were a mainstay of the luggage industry. They aren’t anymore.
“Finally, society itself has changed,” Shinn said. “A hundred years ago the rule of thumb was, Bring everything you might conceivably need. Nowadays most of what anyone needs is available at the destination or along the way.” In the United States we can take advantage of a variety of roadside conveniences, largely classless in appeal, that will ease our progress across the continent. Many hotels offer clothing stores, restaurants, and pharmacies; the better establishments provide robes, shower caps, and toiletries in one’s room. At least in the developed world almost anything else a traveler desires is available within minutes of a call to the porter’s desk. Ralph Caplan writes, “The closer the stuff at your destination matches the stuff at the point of departure, the less luggage you will need. When the match is perfect, you won’t need any.”
I HAPPEN TO like the modern way. I like knowing that I could awaken one day, lock the house, and, with only the credit cards in my pocket, venture hither and yon for months on end, living comfortably, perhaps even in style. Still, the Cooper-Hewitt show evokes a certain wistfulness for a world we have lost. When Napoleon, in 1812, embarked on his Russian adventure, he brought with him, according to the historian Nigel Nicolson, “a court on wheels [with] pages for the Emperor and maids-ofhonour for Marie-Louise, and innumerable carts to carry plate and tapestries.... It was accompanied by another army of bakers, tailors, masons, shoemakers, gunsmiths, camp-followers and historians.” Napoleon traveled with a monogrammed drinking glass, which he carried in a snug leather case. It is on display at the Cooper-Hewitt. So is the elegant dressing case (known as a nécessaire de voyage) that belonged to Marshal Ney, the last of Napoleon’s commanders to leave Russian soil. It contains combs, brushes, shaving equipment, an assortment of vials for powders and pomades, manicure tools, boot hooks, a corkscrew, and a flask.
The invasion of Russia was not undertaken for pleasure, but it differed from tourism of the day in degree rather than in kind. People traveled on the assumption that services promised at their destination might, as Napoleon discovered in Moscow, turn out to be unavailable. The first real restaurant (as opposed to coffeehouses, which catered primarily to a local trade) and the first real hotel (as opposed to inns, which were chancy affairs indeed) did not appear until the 1760s. Young gentlemen setting off on the Grand Tour were lectured on the virtues of self-reliance. The advice offered by William Wey to fifteenth-century pilgrims was heeded by the wise for three or four centuries thereafter, at least in spirit. Wey recommended that travelers take with them a feather bed, a mattress, two pillows, and a quilt; laxatives and spices, a coop of live chickens, and a half bushel of millet; also, “a little cauldron and a frying pan, dishes, plates, saucers of wood, cups of glass, [and] a grater for bread and such necessaries”; plus a “bowl for sickness.”
It may be that the historic clash of competing impulses—of Travel Light with Be Prepared—is now far easier to avoid than it was at any time in the past. But as this exhibit makes plain, the very finest examples of luggage design occur when the challenge of doing both must be squarely faced. It was successfully faced by the designers of the duffel bag, who came up with the luggage equivalent of an egg: a tidy container for only what is necessary. In recent years the challenge has been faced primarily by astronauts and backpackers—two types of travelers who have learned a great deal from each other. Camping gear, in particular, has been significantly improved by material and conceptual spinoffs from the space program. It seems somehow fitting that the modern pioneers of travel design should include those using the oldest means of transportation as well as those using the newest.
I mentioned this to the curator, Deborah Shinn. “Actually,” she said, “it isn’t really ‘fitting’ at all. It‘s just normal. Travel design grows at both ends. We think up new ways to accommodate new ways of moving around, but walking is still the thing we do most. That’s the way it was a hundred years ago. That‘s the way it will be forever.”
