As creative director of Colette, the influential Paris store she founded with her mother, Colette Roussaux, Sarah Andelman created an acclaimed hub of all sorts of distinctive items that were frequently quirky and uniformly stylish.
Just in time for Paris Fashion Week, Ms. Andelman has curated another eclectic retail space: the Paris department store Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche. It includes more than 1,000 items in a Colette-esque range of categories and prices, ranging from a three-euro commemorative postcard to a 60,000-euro table designed by the architect Aline Asmar d’Amman. The project, called Mise en Page, French for “layout,” is essentially a concept store spread over more than 10,000 square feet and many store windows with a shared theme: books, literature and writing.
“I wanted to have a story, a link, to fill all this space, and books was perfect,” Ms. Andelman said in a phone interview from her office, a short ride by bicycle (her preferred mode of transportation) from Le Bon Marché.
Last September, Ms. Andelman began reaching out to some 100 brands for the venture, which runs through April 21. The bulk of what’s included will be sold exclusively at Le Bon Marché while the project is up; most items were created especially for it.
Ms. Andelman said that visits to independent bookshops on her travels — like the Strand Book Store in New York and Cow Books in Tokyo, both of which have branded items at Mise en Page — influenced the collaboration and her feeling about the overall state of retail.
“If the bookshops manage to survive in this world of social media and e-commerce,” she said, then the types of items that are trickier than books to buy online, like fashion and beauty products, should be able to survive as well.
“It makes me so happy to see everywhere these resistants who manage to keep a physical brick-and-mortar experience,” she added.
Ms. Andelman’s obsession with books predates the internet era.
“She always loved bookstores and art books, and in her mind she always wanted to maybe to become a publisher,” said Victoire de Taillac-Touhami, a friend of Ms. Andelman’s since they were teenagers and Colette’s publicist for the first seven years it was open. “At her core, what she prefers is books.”
Ms. Touhami is a founder of the Officine Universelle Buly beauty brand, and for Mise en Page, Buly is offering ceramic pencils that come with a scented spray that’s intended to evoke the ancient Egyptian Great Library of Alexandria. Other fragrance companies, including Diptyque and Byredo, are offering items like candles that smell like paper and libraries.
Mise en Page’s array also includes alphabet-adorned jewelry from Acmée and Vanrycke, Figaret pajamas with a notebook-size pocket and a Longchamp book carrier. There are key chains from Various Keytags with sayings like “I’d rather be reading” and “Book Smart” and notebooks, bookends and pens from a variety of brands. There are books, too — from imprints like Assouline and Taschen.
Since 2021, Ms. Andelman has been the sole employee of Just an Idea Books, a publishing company she founded to put out monographs by creative people whose work she likes. The company prints between 300 and 500 copies of each title, each priced at 50 euros.
“At the scale I’m doing it, it’s not that complicated,” Ms. Andelman said.
Books aren’t anything new for Ms. Andelman. At Colette, which was open from 1997 through 2017, “I used to publish some leeee-tul books,” she said, but they were, as she put it, “really catalogs for some exhibitions we had.” The store carried many titles as well.
The timing of her latest venture is fortuitous: Books are having a bit of a fashion moment. In February, for example, Saint Laurent opened a book-focused shop in Paris, curated by its creative director, Anthony Vaccarello.
Ms. Andelman’s publishing imprint is essentially an offshoot of her consulting business, Just an Idea, which she founded in 2018. She’s the only staffer of that enterprise, too. The agency, which plays matchmaker for artists and designers with brands, has worked with companies like Moncler, Schiaparelli and Valentino.
“I like to be able to work with lots of different brands, to still learn and discover,” she said.
Asked if she’ll ever open her own store, the answer is a resounding “non.”
“I prefer to do this short pop-up here and there and collaborate with brands,” she said.
“But I will continue the books,” she added, “because I love this connection with artists.”
