Armand Dupree logo
The logo of cosmetics brand Armand Dupree represents one of the higher profile uses of the Fidelio typeface. Armand Dupree is a subbrand of Fuller Cosmetics and has been known since the late 1990s. It is owned by the Tupperware Brands Corporation.
Fidelio was designed by José Mendoza y Almeida and issued in 1980 by Mecanorma, the French manufacturer of dry transfer sheets. Freed from the limitations of metal type, Mendoza could fit his chancery script with sweeping swashes for the capitals as well as for alternate initial and terminal lowercase forms. Corpus typographique français has an image that shows the impressive glyph set of the Mecanorma release, including ligatures, a swash numeral 1, and no less than four different forms for g.
The Armand Dupree wordmark combines Fidelio’s more lavish variants of A and D into a vertical ligature. This device is also used for the framed monogram. The final e is one of the two terminal forms for this character. At some point, the logo was altered, see the last image. All lowercase characters were replaced by Times New Roman Italic (with a modified p). The swash caps with their high recognition value were emulated. The reason for this change might be the same as the one that we speculated about in regard to the Wienerschnitzel logo: Maybe Armand Dupree needed a vector version, but couldn’t find the correct font. Only in 2010, Neufville Digital released an official digital version of Mendoza’s chancery script, with many revised glyphs and extended language support.
Today Atelier National de Recherche Typographique announced that José Mendoza y Almeida has passed away, at age 91. If you are interested in his work, get your hands on the bilingual French-English monograph by Martin Majoor and Sébastien Morlighem, published by Ypsilon Éditeur in their Bibliothèque Typographique. Dan Reynolds has written a review for I Love Typography.
