BOOK CLUB: Montblanc hosted a breakfast on Thursday during men’s fashion week in Paris at La Réserve — no doubt chosen for its handsome, book-lined reception rooms.
Libraries are the focus of the German luxury brand’s latest ad campaign, which made its debut on Thursday on billboards around Paris, and also on digital channels, underscoring its brand narrative around handwriting, ink and the power of words.
British actor Callum Turner, one of the stars of the campaign, appears writing in a notebook and inspecting the shelves of a library in Milan. He noted there was also a $4 million Ferrari on set, which he got to drive.
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“It was a lot of fun,” he enthused.
Turner confessed to having rather atrocious handwriting, but a voracious appetite for reading, having just devoured “Tenth of December,” a collection of short stories by American author George Saunders.
The actor recently wrapped filming George Clooney’s next film, “The Boys in the Boat,” based on Daniel James Brown’s 2013 novel about the University of Washington men’s rowing team that stunned the world by winning gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Shot by photographer Mariano Vivanco, the campaign also stars models Kit Butler, Justice Joslin and Mattia Narducci exploring a library, Montblanc pen in hand.
Montblanc plans to shoot the next chapter of its “Library Spirit” campaign next month in London, with those visuals launching in May.
According to Marco Tomasetta, artistic director of Montblanc, libraries are a place where “words are there to be discovered.…We want to invite others into this world to be inspired, to learn something new, to be challenged.”
In tandem with the theme, and fashion week, Montblanc also displayed highlights of its Sartorial collection at the breakfast. The smart-looking, structured leather goods are built as a modular system that allows small pouches to be attached to larger bags in multiples.
Library-goers will find out if they snap together silently enough.