JUST IN CASE

The makeup bag is a star in itself.

- Leslie Camhi

INSIDE STORY TOP: A beauty case photographed for Vogue in 1939. MIDDLE AND BOTTOM: This fall, Louis Vuitton launches a beauty line, with a series of leather goods to house the products.

In 1938, with a war brewing in Europe, French artist Marcel Duchamp began gathering materials for his Box-in-a-Suitcase. He planned 20 deluxe editions of this modest-size case, whose contents would reveal 69 reproductions of his most significant artworks—a miniature museum retrospective. Pretending to be a cheese merchant, he smuggled these materials through occupied France, shipping them at last across the Atlantic to be assembled under the free skies of New York.

Duchamp may have been inspired by those toiletry kits called nécessaires de voyage that had existed in France since medieval times. (Vintage cases by Hermès from the 1940s are still available online—sober, executive-style briefcases concealing all the elements of a sophisticated masculine grooming ritual.) The form had earlier reached an apogee in the 18th century, when kits were created by the finest artisans. Queen Marie Antoinette, under house arrest during the French Revolution and planning her escape, sent ahead her precious nécessaire, a box fitted to contain 94 items—not only vessels for perfumes and medicines, ebony cylinders for powders, and ivory brushes, but also a silver and porcelain service for making tea and hot chocolate. She was known to be so attached to this object that her sending it abroad aroused suspicions.

Today we are once again living through turbulent times. Perhaps that’s why the luxury trade is betting that people who travel will want to take their home beauty routines along with them. A