Is a pricey leather notebook the new style status symbol? | Canada Voices

Paris’s Passage du Grand-Cerf is a shopping arcade built in 1825 that features wooden storefronts and a high glass ceiling – and lately, a line of mostly millennial and Gen Z women in front of one retailer.

They’re waiting to enter Louise Carmen, where they will create a customized leather notebook like the kind one might imagine Colette used to pen her prose. (For the record, she didn’t – the brand was founded just a decade ago).

I’ve lived in Paris for several years but only recently learned about Louise Carmen, not by word-of-Parisian-mouth but on TikTok. On the platform, you’ll find an endless stream of women in their 20s and 30s – including celebrities such as Canadian actor Shay Mitchell – who take viewers inside the boutique for a peek at the brand’s bespoke design process and the charm-bedazzled finished product.

Louise Carmen recently opened its second boutique at Galerie Vivienne, near the Jardin du Palais Royal. Each store serves about five customers at a time. A sales associate works with shoppers individually to create their personalized notebook, helping them select every little detail: size, paper (lined or dotted), shade of the leather trifold case and pocket insert, colour of the wraparound cord, embossing and charms (such as a little red heart, brass feather or gold Lovers tarot card).

An hour or so later, it’s ready: a charming, antique-looking journal with refillable pages, which many Louise Carmen fans on TikTok say they plan to use for journalling and to keep forever – and, it would seem, to show off.

These social media videos are about more than just revealing a beautiful notebook. They also signal one’s style cred at a time when bookworm chic is having a moment.

“I’ve been obsessed with Louise Carmen notebooks,” said Toronto-based Mishal Cazmi, the editorial lead at Pinterest Canada and author of the Substack newsletter Small Joys, a round-up of fun and beautiful ideas and objects that catch her eye. “My soul temporarily left my body when I first saw the price tag and the shipping fees,” she wrote in a recent newsletter. “At one slightly delusional moment in time, I even considered buying a plane ticket to Paris so I could visit the store and buy my journal in person.”

The notebooks start at roughly $197 for the smallest option, which includes just a leather cover and paper notebook. But when you add the personalized accoutrements – the elements that tip the notebook from object to obsession – such as charms, embossing and an interior pocket, the price adds up fast. If I were to build my dream Louise Carmen notebook, which would include a leather pocket insert (about $197) and at least three charms (ranging from $32 to $97 apiece) and ship it to Canada, it would cost $756. (In France, it would cost slightly less at $602). Cazmi, for her part, ultimately decided to make her own version using an Etsy dupe.

Bookworm chic is hot right now – even if you don’t actually read

So, how to justify the hefty price tag? Does a charming notebook somehow make one’s writing better?

Emma Knight, author of the 2025 novel The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, hadn’t heard of the viral accessories until I asked her about them. “My first reaction was that they are too beautiful to write in,” she said. “I would want every sentence to be jewel-like, and mine are not. I need to be able to scratch out entire pages and make furious margin notes.”

Instead, Knight often uses any paper she can get her hands on: the back of a grocery list, the edges of a bookmark or her kids’ abandoned drawings. But an 8×10 ruled cahier is her preferred notebook. The author has been hooked on Hilroy exercise books (four for $6) since childhood “because they’re light to carry, large enough in format that you can get some purchase on an idea before you turn the page, and bound, so everything is contained,” she said.

Perhaps what matters most in a notebook is that it meets the needs of its owner, whether that means it’s practical to carry around, its beauty makes it more enticing to reach for than a phone or its mere existence telegraphs to others that, yes, I’m a literary person – and also, I went to Paris and took home the city’s buzziest souvenir.