Fashion has embraced technology but it still loves a pencil. And a posh notebook, a sharpie and embossed notecards. Inspired by Tom Ford and her school filofax, Jess Cartner-Morley on her stationery obsession
It began, as character-defining crushes so often do, on French exchange. I was 13, immersed in Frenchness for the first time, and it was fabulous. First because each morning for breakfast we were given a bowl of hot chocolate and a stack of creamy, scallop-edged biscuits to dip into it. But also because of the stationery. I fell madly, deeply in love with the school exercise books, which were A5-sized, sewn-spined, the pages chequered with a faint quadrille. So elegant, so precise, so chic. WHSmith’s spiral-bound lined notebooks were dead to me from that day onward, and a lifelong love affair was born.
Stationery is more emotional than fashion, notebooks and diaries more intimate than your knicker drawer. I can measure out my life in paper, from those flimsy notebooks to the ludicrously expensive Smythson ones I use now. My teenage diaries are even now redolent with the pointless intensity of childhood secrets. The Filofax and Mont Blanc fountain pen I had as a sixth former are unthrowable still, despite or perhaps because of the painfully earnest copied-out quotes and in-jokes scrawled in the margins. I have a treasured folder filled with notepaper from every swanky hotel I have ever stayed in: the Savoy in Florence, with its tiny terracotta duomo motif; Claridge’s, where we stayed on my husband’s 40th. And I have the giveaway organisational safety harnesses of every overwrought modern professional. (Current obsession: the Leuchtturm 1917 pencil loops, fixed in the back of every notebook and diary to save precious seconds on endlessly updating my to-do lists.)
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