FPM’s approach to collaboration has always been grounded in design rather than fashion. From early in its revival, the brand worked with some of the most credible figures in contemporary industrial and product design — Stefano Giovannoni, Jean-Marie Massaud, Marcel Wanders, Nendo’s Oki Sato, and Marc Sadler as the ongoing creative anchor. This was not about celebrity endorsement or capsule drops. It was about what happens when people who think seriously about objects are given a serious object to think about.

Marcel Wanders brought his characteristic tension between the baroque and the functional to the Saint-Jacques collection, suitcases that took the rigorous material demands of travel and ran them through his signature lens of ornament and narrative. Oki Sato and Nendo, who won the Wallpaper Design Award in 2012 and whose work has a quality of making complex things feel almost startlingly simple, designed the Kame collection, a case whose silhouette references the shell of a tortoise in a way that feels obvious only after you see it. Jean-Marie Massaud, whose practice spans from stadium architecture to automotive design and who won the Compasso d’Oro in 2011, brought a different kind of architectural rigour.

Sadler’s own collaborations with FPM have become increasingly expansive. He has taken the Bank chassis and used it as a starting point for a series of special editions that turn luggage into something closer to a proposition about how to live while travelling: a portable workstation built into the trunk format, a cookstation housing a cooktop and refrigerator within a recycled aluminium shell, a bedstation. These pieces debut at events like Milan Design Week, where they are understood not as novelties but as genuine design statements. The logic running through all of them is the same one that animates the Bank itself: a well-made container can hold almost anything worth carrying.

The fashion collaborations have been equally considered. FPM for Gucci brought the Italian luxury house’s recognisable red and green stripe as a strap detail across the aluminium body, a pairing of two Milan institutions that managed to feel neither forced nor obvious. Fendi and Chanel have both worked with FPM on private-label pieces. The Globe-Trotter collaboration, released in 2025, is perhaps the most interesting of recent partnerships: two heritage luggage houses with entirely different craft traditions, FPM’s Italian aluminium engineering meeting Globe-Trotter’s vulcanised fibreboard panels, a material the British maker has used since 1897. The resulting Bank Centenary collection, available in Ocean Green and Black across five pieces including a trunk and vanity case, is one of those rare collaborations where neither house has to compromise its identity to make the thing work. The tension between the two approaches is the point. FPM has also partnered with Pagani, the Italian hypercar manufacturer, which makes sense the moment you think about it: two companies that treat aluminium as a material worthy of obsession.

As someone who has traversed the full spectrum — the 60-litre backpack, the overstuffed tote, the 40-kilogram checked bag paired with a handbag that was supposed to do everything — I can say with some authority that the right luggage genuinely changes the experience of travel. I have carried bags down New York subway stairs, up cobblestone streets in Versailles, and thrown them into taxis in Kathmandu. The verdict is this: luggage that works well is luggage you stop thinking about.

Coming up to Sydney for Vivid and the film festival, I brought the trunk and soft backpack from FPM Milano. It has been a complete game changer. The combination of structure and ease, the way the trunk moves through airports, the fact that I have not once had to question whether it would hold up. The ease, the absence of worry, is what you are actually paying for.

There is a broader argument to be made here about the aluminium suitcase as a cultural object. We are slowly moving away from the logic of fast consumption toward something more deliberate, and not just in fashion, though the appetite for archival pieces, for considered dressing, for things that earn their place in a wardrobe rather than temporarily filling it, is clearly growing. It is about how we equip ourselves for living.

FPM sits at the intersection of that shift. It is not a brand asking you to buy into a seasonal story. It is a family-owned Milanese house with nearly eighty years of continuous craft behind it, making the same fundamental object — a case to carry your things, beautifully and and refining it endlessly. The aluminium trunk is not a luxury purchase in the sense of excess. It is a luxury purchase in the original sense: something made so well that it outlasts the need to replace it.

That feels, right now, like exactly the right kind of thing to own.

FPM Milano is available globally at select luxury retailers and at fpm.it