You consider yourself an influencer. A few thousand Instagram followers agree. Photos of your cocktails, your midcentury furniture, your body moving through museums, through notable cities, sitting in international airports. It’s February, and @you are landing back in your adopted home for the Frieze Los Angeles art fair.

“No one builds a legacy by standing still,” says RIMOWA, the manufacturer of the $1,150 aluminum suitcase you wheel through the door of your Venice apartment after giving the Uber from LAX four out of five stars (no iPhone charger). As RIMOWA proposes, you find this luggage to be an “essential tool for the modern discerning traveler.” And whether in Bali or Berlin, that’s you: never a tourist, questing after the artisanal, avoiding discussion of income sources, wandering but never lost.

At a nearby cafe, upon a table of handmade material reclaimed from demolished low-income housing, you curate your own list of Frieze’s VIP events to attend, planning thoughtful, mixologist-approved drinks in between.

Before arriving at Paramount Pictures, you add a stop in West Hollywood so you can see the Alex Israel project you’d learned about from the half-hearted snaps of someone who only moved to LA weeks ago. A flash of competitiveness as your Uber heads up La Cienega: your followers are expecting authentic content from you, a two-year native, not some jet setter who can’t even use “Light and Space Movement” as an analogy yet. You try to focus while live-streaming your ride.

Alex Israel’s RIMOWA installation at La Cienega & Melrose, 2019.

Google tells the driver to turn right on Melrose and you see a 20-foot-tall rolling suitcase towering over the intersection, half-opened and hugging metal scaffolding supporting two neon signs luminously breaking through automobile-induced isolation  to declare: “Alex Israel” and “RIMOWA.” Stunned and forgetting to look at your phone, you instantly recall an interview with RIMOWA’s rakish CEO, Alexandre Arnault: “Everybody is talking about this shift from property ownership to experience ownership.” Seeing the pink and pale blue of Israel’s effervescent gradient rise triumphantly into the uncharacteristically cloudy sky, you’re warmed by a deep connection with this artwork, with this artist and his ever-present sunglasses. There, perched on white pedestals like the most challenging of sculptures, are two Cabin-sized RIMOWA Originals telling you that your own journey is about to change.

Blood flow normalizes and, extending the neon signs into participatory performance, you quickly search “alex israel rimowa” and read that the artist, “imagined these suitcases by answering a simple question: What’s the suitcase I’d want to look at and wheel through LAX?” In a collaboration so perfect you barely could dream it, LA-born Israel and the Cologne-based corporation teamed up to commission a $2,800 (each) art series (available this summer), marrying their iconic lifestyle products into one. “The answer,” says the artist, “. . . often comes back to the sky over Los Angeles—it’s just my favorite thing to look at.” Luggage tags featuring Israel’s bearded profile accompany each case.

You’ve had your own brand partnerships: Moscow Mule mugs, CBD-infused ointment, but nothing representing your entire raison d’être: here, in two suitcases (orange-to-blue and pink-to-blue; #sunset, #sunrise), is proof that the “x” in “BRAND 1 x BRAND 2” symbolizes more than shared advertising: It’s a proclamation of unity, strengthening the suggestion of the lives lived via (preferably frequent) purchases of each.

You’re staring at the top of the suitcase installation and doubts flood your mental feed: Could you play at this level? When you’re approaching your business-class seat, and someone looks at your non-artwork RIMOWA suitcase and not at your page, do they know the ways you’ve fulfilled your self-appointment as a global ambassador for Angelenos? Certainly, they know Israel’s—he radiates LA from Dodgers jacket to name-dropping. When you first saw his paintings, their electrographic processes jolted from your cerebral cortex all the ways you instantly understood “Los Angeles” when you were five. Pink, palm trees, sunglasses. He didn’t become the favorite artist of ex-New Yorkers for nothing.

This is what that transplant’s “West Coast, Best Coast” snaps can’t convey: the yearning to push the definition of influence, to dissolve any distinction between LA-based human and LA-based brand. Like political cartoon octopi, Alex Israel reaches to inscribe that he is from LA, his things are from LA, and paying for his things makes the buyer part of LA, too. RIMOWA saw this—now their things are from LA. It’s an LA collaboration to end all LA collaborations, a Great War of SoCal branding.

And you look at your Instagram page and see the regurgitated Joan Didion quotes and know you can do more. Let the suitcase lead the way.