Stationery from Lignon, a French paper-goods brand rooted in Auvergne’s printing tradition, wrapped in vintage maps of the region.

On the Paper Trail

As screens grow ever more exhausting, paper is making a stylish comeback—and in Paris, new stationers and heritage brands are dusting off the old letterpresses

By Eugene Rabkin

“Everything I do is against A.I.,” Ramdane Touhami says as he shows me around Papier Royal, his recently opened stationery store in the Palais-Royal, one of Paris’s grandest shopping arcades, home to the flagships of cult fashion and fragrance brands such as Lemaire, Rick Owens, and Serge Lutens. Beneath the imposing colonnade, the jewel-box storefront looks intimate and inviting.

Touhami has built a career on resurrecting moribund French brands. His greatest success is the skin-care brand Officine Universelle Buly 1803, whose fanciful stores attract hordes of TikTok tourists squeezing in a museum visit between queues for frozen yogurt and matcha. After Touhami sold Buly to LVMH in 2021, he set his sights on paper. Judging by the crowds at Papier Royal, he may have hit a nerve.