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 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.
This fall the company is launching a new series of beauty products under the direction of Pat McGrath, with packaging that is both reusable and customizable, so that your own initials can be inscribed on your tube of lipstick, alongside the famous L and V. Makeup with casing this chic almost demands public application, whether en route to work or at the table of some fabulous restaurant. And when that need arises, you won’t have to rummage in your handbag because Vuitton has also proposed a series of small leather goods to house these products. There are traditional vanities in both the house’s signature monogram print and in shades inspired by the new lipsticks. But I was most taken with the mini cases designed for single cosmetics—an eye shadow palette, for example, held in a pouch resembling a miniature hatbox—which you can hang like charms from your purse or luggage.
To be sure, nothing transports you quite like perfume, and for olfactory travel, you needn’t even leave home. But if you do, Henry Jacques has some suggestions. For decades, this family-owned company created bespoke perfumes for a select clientele; today, visitors to its shop on Avenue Montaigne in Paris will find the fragrance journey beginning even before they enter the boutique, as they pass through a small garden subtly assailing them with scent. “We have a lot of clients who are connoisseurs, completely passionate about perfume,” the company’s current director (and daughter of its founder) Anne-Lise Cremona explains. “You get addicted to it, and when you are far from home, you need to have your collection with you.” A few years ago, one of the brand’s international clients “arrived with an entire suitcase filled with our perfumes,” Cremona recalls. “That was when I thought I had to do something.”
So HJ Voyage was born, a line of travel cases for scent, crafted from sumptuous materials like powder blue crocodile leather and inky Japanese eel skin. A short time later, the company introduced the Clic-Clac. This slim titanium rectangle slides open, via patented watchmaking techniques, to reveal a capsule of the finest solid perfume. A recent edition of the Clic-Clac in rose gold is adorned with a floral design inspired by Art Deco—carnelian cabochon petals surrounded by diamond dewdrops. It was, frankly, a little too easy for me to imagine pulling it out of my purse after dinner and resting it briefly on the table before dabbing on a bit of perfume. “Accessories can inspire confidence,” Cremona explains. I can believe that too.