Les Fleurs Aubergine Hardcover Journal — Aubergine Tropical Leaves Notebook

The aubergine and tropical leaf combination on this journal’s cover belongs to the register of French exoticism that has been present in the decorative arts since at least the seventeenth century — when the compagnies des Indes began importing lacquerwork and textiles that changed the colour vocabulary of European interiors forever. The deep eggplant ground is a colour that France has always known how to use: in the silks of Lyon, in the glazed tiles of the south, in the wallpapers of the grandes maisons de décoration that still line the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The tropical leaves rising against it are the collector’s acknowledgment that beauty does not require provenance.

The Les Fleurs collection understands that the best botanical imagery is always partly about the background: the ground against which the plant is set determines whether the illustration is scientific, decorative, or something more ambiguous. Against this deep aubergine, the leaves become architectural, structural, a pattern as resolved as a formal garden. It is a cover for people who notice such things.

Inside, 150 lined perforated pages on a flat-opening sewn binding — the working interior of a journal designed to go everywhere its keeper goes.