Notes to Self

Shanghai

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Moleskine

There is something deliciously transgressive about rifling through other people’s notebooks, the experience mediated only by a pair of cotton gloves and a hovering student volunteer from Tongji University here.

Permission to snoop comes courtesy of Detour: The Moleskine Notebook Experience, a traveling exhibition of Moleskine-brand notebooks that has recently made its way to Shanghai after traveling to London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul, Tokyo, and Venice, collecting new additions from various creative types along the way. The Shanghai stop features 50-odd notebooks, almost all of which visitors are free to thumb through as they please. The exhibit is hosted on Shanghai’s historic waterfront, in a charming 1923 neoclassical building that was once the national headquarters of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China and today is home to a high-end shopping arcade featuring Cartier and Zegna flagship boutiques and a few of the city’s swankiest nightclubs and restaurants.

It’s a fitting space to showcase Moleskine, a brand whose identity relies heavily on tenuous claims to a historic pedigree. Launched in 1997 by Italian company Modo and Modo, Moleskine owes its success to a clever marketing campaign associating the “legendary” notebook with iconic artists who reportedly carried similar pocket-sized journals, including Picasso, Hemingway, and Van Gogh. “It’s an exaggeration,” Modo and Modo spokesman Francesco Franceschi told the New York Times in 2004. “It’s marketing, not science. It’s not the absolute truth.”

Expertly curated by Rafaella Guidobono, Detour affirms the brand’s bona fides as the notebook of choice for the creative classes by association with living, breathing artists, from China’s beloved bad-boy blogger Han Han to Swiss art critic Hans-Ulrich Obrist to the Italian cellist and composer Giovanni Sollima.