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.
