The Case for a Place to Keep Your Makeup

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