The Case for a Makeup Bag

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.

This fall, Louis Vuitton launches a beauty line, with a series of leather goods to house the products.

Photo: Courtesy of Louis Vuitton Malletier Archives.

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 nécessaire, after all, promises a portable cocoon of refinement, comfort, and familiarity. Forget snail slime—these days it’s the snail’s shell that our frayed psyches are seeking, a layer of protection in an uncertain world.

The evidence? Models for Victoria Beckham’s fall 2025 collection strode through a bare-bones building in central Paris, sporting side-parted, slicked-back hair and ultraserious demeanors as they clutched what appeared to be small, rectangular vanities. Dior this fall is offering “fragrance cases”—cylindrical canisters for single scents—and mini trunks for multiple perfumes. The cases come embroidered in one of the house’s signature prints, including houndstooth—founder Christian Dior’s sly nod to menswear—and they are finished by hand in leather. So if borders begin to close, you can still enjoy the perfume contents of your mini trunk at home or pack it to ride the subway or the bus in style. There you might also spot the cute pouches for Chanel’s holiday makeup kits, in nubby tweeds laced with metallic thread, doing double duty as handbags. (Last year’s fuzzy white pouch sported the Chanel Beauté logo to distinguish it, I suppose, from the genuine article—a Chanel purse.)

Of course, master luggage maker Louis Vuitton, who began his career in the 19th century as a box maker, knew a thing or two about packing. By the 1920s, responding to both a travel boom and an increasing desire for opulence, the company that he had founded was producing elegant Art Deco travel kits, ingeniously designed to safely transport the elements of a sophisticated toilette. An entire line of Louis Vuitton toiletry cases was named after the legendary French soprano Marthe Chenal, whose spirited rendition of “La Marseillaise” on Armistice Day 1918 had helped to rouse a battered Paris, and who traveled the world with a bespoke Louis Vuitton vanity, covered in crocodile leather and fitted with tortoiseshell and silver vermeil.