Leica × RIMOWA

Announced September 27, 1958 at photokina in Cologne, the KOFAL was shown on the Leitz stand open, with an M3 and a rigid Summicron in its tray, while a second case stood on the floor beside it with a RIMOWA salesman standing on top. The catalogue gave it the order code KOFAL, for Koffer Aluminium, and nobody in Wetzlar saw any reason to think of another name.

The brief came from Leitz, whose leather outfit cases were losing to press photographers who used them as seats, steps and tables. Richard Morszeck offered his ribbed tropical shell. Willi Stein's department refused to put a suitcase catch anywhere near a Leica and instead drew the top edge as an M3 top plate: a chrome-plated brass rail with the camera's rounded ends, a strip of the camera's vulcanite beneath it, and two latches that do not match. The left is a small knurled knob turned like the M3 rewind knob; the right is a wider dial with a knurled rim, placed where the shutter speeds would be. Each turns a quarter turn to draw a steel cam. AUF and ZU were engraved on the same machines that cut camera top plates.

Inside, a removable beech tray in black pebble-grain leatherette and grey felt holds an M3 or M2 body, a 35 mm Summaron, a 50 mm Summicron, a 135 mm Hektor, a Leica-Meter MC and twelve film cassettes standing in a row of turned sockets. The lid carries a chrome plate engraved with an exposure table for Agfa Isopan F and Kodak Plus-X. RIMOWA pressed the ribs at 14 mm, closer than on any of its own cases, so that a leather sole would grip them. The vulcanite band chips at the corners exactly as it does on the camera, which owners reported with some pride.

Each case left Cologne with a small card stating it had been tested under a standing load of 90 kg for one minute. Photographers at Stern and Paris Match took this as a challenge. In October 1958 Leitz received a letter from a photographer in Hamburg reporting that his case had held him, his assistant and a Linhof tripod during the closing week of the Brussels Expo, and asking whether this voided the guarantee. Leitz replied that it did not, and that the tripod fell outside the scope of the test.