THE ERA OF steamship travel — when steamer trunks were the de rigueur way for wealthy people to carry their belongings across oceans — is long gone. Now, we seek rolling carry-ons that provide the most ergonomic way to shuffle our possessions through airport terminals and into cramped overhead compartments. And yet the idea of the classic trunk itself has never lost its appeal. It’s an artifact of a more exotic era when journeying really was a journey, and those old containers needed to hold so much because, if you were lucky enough to be traveling before the jet age, you’d probably be staying for a long time.

Personally, I prefer living now, when flights are relatively easy and abundant, but I have always — always — wanted a steamer trunk made by Louis Vuitton, the patron saint of such items, having produced the most exquisite boxes for over 150 years. It’s amazing to think that the LV trunk was once entirely practical: They forged a library trunk for Ernest Hemingway to carry his many books around the world (perhaps even to his famous Mount Kilimanjaro safaris) and a trunk for Greta Garbo designed to hold her massive shoe collection so she could look like a movie star anywhere she went.

There’s something glamorous — even a little campy — about LV’s latest take on the trunk: the Cabinet of Curiosities, created in collaboration with the legendary designer Marc Newson. It has 19 leather cubes in three different sizes, all of which are removable so that you can rearrange the setup in a hundred different ways.

Yes, you could technically bring it on a first-class trip to Saint-Tropez, but that’s not really the point in 2023, when no one wants to schlep such a thing through airport security. This Cabinet of Curiosities has a 180-degree opening, so it can be used as a display in your home, almost a bookshelf, where you can place objets d’art, coffee-table tomes, tchotchkes, and trinkets of all shapes and sizes in the various compartments. It ingeniously makes a spectacle of the steamer trunk itself, turning it into its own object of fascination more than function.

I’ll never be able to board the Queen Elizabeth 2 for a trip across the pond. But, maybe, with the Cabinet of Curiosities in my living room, I can dream of having a daiquiri with Katharine Hepburn on the lido deck, while packing my actual suitcase — perhaps the much more practical Louis Vuitton carry-on — for a trip on a fast plane somewhere spectacular.