Strong Water and the North Star
Philippe Montagne on eau-forte engraving, five centuries of artists, and why a compass rose travels on the side of the 96Hrs
A second conversation with the founder of Maison Philippe Montagne, Paris.
Some techniques belong so completely to the museum that we forget they were once industrial secrets. Eau-forte — literally “strong water,” the old French name for the acid that bites a drawing into metal — is one of them. Today it hangs framed under the names of Rembrandt and Goya. Five hundred years ago it lived in the workshops of armourers, ornamenting the steel that men wore into battle. It is from that first life, not the second, that Maison Philippe Montagne borrowed it back.
When we last spoke, Philippe Montagne told the story of the drawings he destroyed before the 96Hrs earned the right to exist. This time the conversation turned to what survived: the engraved panels themselves, and the four-pointed Compass Star pattern that crosses them.
Let us begin with the technique. What exactly is eau-forte, and where does it come from?
It is drawing with acid. The metal plate is covered with a protective ground, the artist draws through the ground with a needle, and then the plate is bathed in eau-forte — the strong water, nitric acid — which bites the metal wherever the needle has passed. What makes it revolutionary is the freedom of the hand. Engraving with a burin is slow, muscular work; the line fights you. With eau-forte the needle glides like a pencil, so the line keeps all the spontaneity and fine detail of a drawing.
And here is the part I love: it was not invented for art. It was invented for armour. The etchers of Augsburg and Milan, in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, used acid to lay delicate ornament onto breastplates and helmets.
Daniel Hopfer, an armour decorator in Augsburg, is generally credited as the first to realise that a plate etched for beauty could also be inked and printed. So the technique passed from the armoury to the atelier. Dürer tried it.
A century later Rembrandt made it one of the great mediums of Western art.
Rembrandt seems an unlikely patron saint for a suitcase.
And yet he is the reason the medium has soul. Rembrandt treated the etched line the way a great writer treats a sentence — reworked, scraped back, bitten again, never quite finished. He proved that metal could hold tenderness. After him the lineage runs like a river through the centuries: Jacques Callot refining the tools, Piranesi building his impossible Roman prisons out of shadow, and then Goya, who used eau-forte to say things about human nature that paint was too polite to say. Los Caprichos still makes people uncomfortable, which is the highest compliment. Later Whistler carried it to the Thames, and Picasso etched hundreds of plates. Five centuries of artists, one strong water. When you choose this technique, you are not choosing a decoration. You are joining a conversation.
Art Deco enters that conversation too, which brings us back to the Maison’s own heritage.
It had to. Art Deco is the last great period when metal was treated as a noble canvas. Think of what the period did with engraved and worked surfaces: Edgar Brandt’s ironwork, Jean Dunand’s metal panels for the great ocean liners, Puiforcat’s silver where a single engraved line replaces all ornament, Lalique drawing into glass as if it were paper. And above it all, the architecture — the sunburst grilles, the etched elevator doors, the geometric friezes of the Chrysler Building or on the Rockefeller center.
The Deco masters understood something the armourers of Augsburg already knew: that engraving is ornament with discipline, pattern that emerges from the material instead of being applied on top of it. That is precisely the MPM idea of beauty. Not decoration added at the end — a line that belongs to the metal itself. So when we engraved the 96Hrs, we were standing on two shoulders at once: the Renaissance armour and the Deco liner.
Which brings us to the pattern itself. Why a Compass Star?
Because we are a Maison du voyage, and the compass rose is the oldest emblem of the journey. Long before there were maps as we know them, the ancients gave the winds names and faces — there is still a Tower of the Winds standing in Athens.
The medieval navigators drew wind roses onto their portolan charts, those beautiful sea maps webbed with lines, and by convention the northern point was crowned with a fleur-de-lis, pointing toward the star that sailors trusted with their lives. The compass rose is therefore two promises in one figure: adventure in every direction, and the certainty of finding your way home. Geometrically, it is also pure Art Deco before the letter — radiating points, symmetry, the energy of a sunburst held in a disciplined frame. When I drew our Compass Star, I was not inventing a logo. I was continuing a symbol that has guided travellers for seven hundred years, and simply giving it the MPM proportions.
How does the pattern live on the case itself?
The Compass Star crosses the side panels of the 96Hrs, engraved into the TitanInox — our alloy of stainless steel finished in titanium PVD. The front and rear plates stay quiet, with their slightly sanded finish, so the sides can speak. This is deliberate. An armour was never engraved everywhere; the ornament was placed where the eye travels. On a suitcase, the sides are what the world sees when the case rolls beside you through an airport or waits in a hotel lobby. There is also an honest technical truth: engraving metal of this hardness forgives nothing. Every line is a negotiation with the artisans, a real dialogue, exactly as it was between the armourer and the etcher five centuries ago. Machines are involved, of course — we are not pretending to be a Renaissance workshop — but the judgment, the depth of the bite, the crispness of each point of the star, that remains a human conversation.
Among metal suitcases, does this make the 96Hrs genuinely alone?
Look at the landscape. The metal luggage that exists today is almost uniformly ribbed, grooved, anonymous — engineering without a signature. Handsome, sometimes, but interchangeable. The 96Hrs is, to my knowledge, the only cabin case that carries a fully engraved figurative pattern in its metal skin, the way an armour or a Deco panel carries one.
That is what engraving does: it turns a surface into a signature. Two travellers may own the same model, but the engraved star catches the light differently on each panel, at each hour, in each airport. The case stops being equipment and becomes an object with a biography — something closer to a watch or a piece of architecture than to luggage.
A last question. Acid, armour, Rembrandt, navigators — it is a long road to a carry-on.
It is, and that is rather the point. The pursuit of beauty is never a straight line; it wanders through armouries and print rooms and ocean liners before it arrives at your gate. Every 96Hrs carries that whole itinerary engraved on its sides — the strong water of the old masters, the geometry of the Deco years, the star that brought the sailors home.
If an object is going to accompany someone around the world for decades, it seems only fair that it should have travelled a few centuries itself before departure.
The 96Hrs cabin case, engraved with the MPM Compass Star, is available in Gold, Silver, Black and Cabernet. Maison Philippe Montagne — Avant-Garde Luxury Bags. Pour le Voyage.
further readings:
The story behind the MPM 96Hrs suitcase design journey.