Once upon a little liberal arts college, I fancied myself a fully accessorized little gay. I had a Vuitton backpack, Vuitton wallet, and Vuitton shoes. I am not joking. This was particularly disturbing to the barefooted, dreadlocked hippie majority at school.
I also had a Louis Vuitton organizer (a.k.a. agenda, planner) that I assumed would get filled up with dates, birthdays, things to remember and keep track of. Instead, it was a bulky, expensive paperweight that I lugged everywhere but rarely opened to feverishly scribble on. It was a (very generous) gift from a friend for graduating high school, and I loved it, despite its form-function balance so out of whack. In a spat of money hunger in college, I eBayed it and have long regretted that decision.
But, never so much as now, when the humble agenda is seeing a comeback. Or at least, a calm and collected resurgence, in the massive and somewhat arrogant wake of the tablet, smartphone, and iEverything. We’re so connected, pinged, and tethered to our devices, we’ve forgotten (or never discovered, depending on your age) the joy of having to write out our schedules every week. In other words, a sort of old fashioned catharsis.
In an agenda, you can scribble notes faster than you can prompt Siri, and you can easily flip back months to recall a phone number, location, or quickly pull up a contact while you’re on the phone, without having to fumble with the phone itself.
This sentiment about technology has been swimming somewhere in my brain the past couple of years, ever since I was expected to have a laptop computer, smartphone, and tablet, which have massive overlapping venn diagram circles (and I therefore feel are in many ways redundant and wasteful, though their usefulness depends on your business or how they are used).
The thoughts were brought to light recently though with a great article from the New York Times, written first person by a diehard (Louis Vuitton) agenda owner. She chronicles the methodic changing of the agenda insert each year, and how reliant she has become on its contents to operate day-to-day. She gets to review each year’s events, and somewhat hoarder-like, saves each year’s inserts, just in case she needs them for reference on down the line.
If you carry and use any agenda, you appreciate writing, even if it’s not writing in a traditional sense. Secondarily, the agenda is also a stylish object, one that, being a Vuitton, symbolizes importance and richness of taste.
Surely, the tablet, now with obscenely low entry prices, is a more multi-talented object, with greater ‘intelligence’ and in many ways, a style of its own. You can customize your tablet with a fancy cover (Louis Vuitton is also in that business).
But, nothing, and I mean nothing, can fully mimic the processes and protocols, and style elements, involved in the use and relative abuse of a leather agenda cover that sticks with you for years. Because I am attracted to such ideals, I have considered the Epi pocket agenda shown above – but have flip flopped with myself about how much it really would get used. Do I have the birthdays, dates to keep, and secrets to tell? Enough to fill it and make it a part of my daily repertoire? I’ll decide when I can afford one.