A couple of weeks ago, we flew to London for our daughter’s graduation, only to find the spanking new terminal at Heathrow Airport for Air Canada passengers so freshly completed it still smells like paint. While it was a delightful surprise to find ourselves in such a virgin public space as if we were back to the dawn of air travel, there was one major drawback that swiftly brought us back to the present: in order to get from the gate to security, one must now hike for 20 minutes through a supremely uninteresting underground passageway. A chore made more tiresome when laden, as most of us appear to be, with carry-ons, like Sherpas mounting Everest.

Without a doubt the getting there part of travel has lost its glamour. Airports are crammed with fellow ill-tempered travellers in snaking queues of black ripstop nylon rolling bags, leaving such graceful notes as the classic suitcase now as redundant as travel by steam engine. Which was why I was so interested to discover, nearly everywhere I look, early signs of the suitcase’s second life.

It would seem the less we actually need something, the more we pine for it. Like antique farm implements, typewriters, vinyl records, and now even books — all of which have emerged from their genteel anachronism to become decorative objets, placed just so atop glass coffee tables and on the walls and shelves of chic stores and restaurants — the latest formerly useful item to make the leap from the culturally endangered list to nostalgic artifact is the suitcase.

In the stalls of the enterprising fancy-food purveyors at London’s Borough market, for instance, I noted artisanal salamis and cheeses displayed in open vintage suitcases lined with checkered gingham, as if one’s chauffeur had packed for a picnic by car somewhere in the Tyrol in the early half of the last century — a conceit which successfully made the handmade nubbiness of the stall’s offerings all the more appealing.

At London’s Somerset House galleries, perhaps the most compelling aspect of a wonderful exhibition on male dandyism called The Return of the Rude Boy was the curator’s cleverness in displaying the show’s images and artifacts in central cabinets constructed out of stacked vintage suitcases — their unpacked open spaces ideal for display purposes while forming a witty diorama reminiscent of the classic English gentleman’s steamer trunk or wardrobe.

Throughout the week, taking a seat at a cafe or browsing cute shops in East London, I kept bumping into the bottom halves of old suitcases, affixed to the walls as open shelves. Their satin-y inner linings, the more torn and evocative the better, taking on a new purpose as an intimate background for the display of other decorative artifacts, from photographs to old album covers.

And then on my return, finding a stack of Restoration Hardware catalogues thicker than the last Yellow Pages on my front steps (surely another anachronism?), it became more clear with the turn of each glossy page showing everything from vintage trunk coffee and bedside tables to Restoration Hardware’s new Richards’ Trunk collection — an entire suitcase-inspired storage line — that this suitcase-as-artifact thing was already on its way to becoming a mass market trend.

What really nailed it for me was something that caught my eye at a luggage shop in the new Heathrow terminal on our way home. The very English Globe-Trotter, which was founded back in 1897, and still equips her Majesty the Queen for travel after supplying her with a classic Dispatch case for her honeymoon (Sir Winston Churchill, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary too, travelled with Globe-Trotter, Hillary to base camp at Everest) now has a new line called the Centenary collection. Handmade, using original Victorian machinery on ultra-high-tech vulcanized fibreboard, and strapped and belted in real English leather, Globe-Trotter’s newest bags look exactly like vintage trunks, but on wheels. Ultralight and manoeuvreable, traditionally outfitted, yet in ultrabright hues, these hybrids have one foot in the past and the other in the future: Neatly fusing in a 21st century way the quotidian needs of today’s traveller with our style memories of when getting there was half the fun.

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