Inside the Parisian Bookstore Dedicated to ‘Precious Fashion Documents’

Where can you find Rei Kawakubo’s Six Magazine, two signed original pictures of 16-year-old Kate Moss’ first editorial and Thierry Mugler runway shows on VHS tapes?

At Parisian bookstore Ephemera, an address dedicated to “precious fashion documents,” as its facade proclaims, located in Paris’ trendy 9th arrondissement.

Inside are more than 1,000 items ranging from magazines and books to look books, invitations, posters and printed materials. And that’s barely a fraction of the 20,000-strong collection amassed by founder Pascal Montfort over the course of his career.

But first things first: He is not a bookseller.  

“I almost conditioned this interview to talking about what I really do for a living,” he jokes. His day job is being a multihyphenate industry veteran who founded Paris-based trends marketing agency REC, which counts the likes of Nike, Lacoste, MAC Cosmetics and Estée Lauder among its long-standing clients.

With REC’s 10th anniversary looming in 2024, Monfort wanted a way to mark the occasion that didn’t involve splashing a five-figure sum on “an evening everyone will have forgotten the next day, plying everyone with bad Champagne on a barge docked by Notre-Dame,” as he put it.

But it was the combination with another milestone that clinched the deal: Hitting 50 had the fashion veteran taking stock of his humongous stash.

Much as social media has become a major avenue for research these days, he also realized that books continued to interest him and that he wasn’t alone, as younger generations also search for the rare and un-Googleable.

“That how I came to the idea that we should make the kind of space I’d dreamt of as a kid, the intersection of a bookstore and a documentation center, open to everyone,” he says.

“It’s connected to the fact that we are talking about fashion, by definition ephemeral,” he says. “Fashion documents are ephemera by essence because a magazine’s July edition is old by August and a 2023 look book is an antiquity, so when things are swept away, they become reference [material], become archives.”    

Hence the store’s name, Ephemera.

Initially it was meant to open during the fall 2024 Paris Fashion Week last September, for three months. But when the deadline to close loomed, Monfort started to feel like a kid whose toy is about to be taken away.

He thrived on the conversations that were being started there, with younger fashion devotees but also with potential clients. “It worked better than hiring a communications officer,” he quips.

Plus, there’s plenty more material to go. So a business plan later, Ephemera is here to stay.

Monfort admits that he’d always felt it was impossible to throw anything away, bar for very rare exceptions.

In his eyes, each piece also felt like a victory and served as tangible proof of each step of a career that is beyond the wildest dreams he held as a kid from Briey, a small town in France’s northeastern region of Lorraine.

As a child, he spent much time browsing the local outpost of La Maison de la Presse, a bookstore chain that offered a wide range of French periodicals as well as international titles.

He’d reach for anything from skateboarding magazines to publications dedicated to various musical genres and subcultures, to even horseback riding.

And then there was Vogue. “I remember being blown away by the photographs by [Jean-Baptiste] Mondino with Jean Paul Gaultier,” he says.

By his early teens, he was a proud subscriber of the now-defunct Vogue Hommes International men’s edition and was diving into any fashion book he could get his hands on.

Despite this early interest, he went on to study sociology at the nearby Université de Metz. “I’d told myself I would never go to fashion school,” he says. “My parents couldn’t afford it and I didn’t think there were other jobs than being a designer anyway.” 

But on a post-graduation whim, he applied to the Université de la Mode in Lyon, doubtful he’d get in — and was admitted.

For all Monfort’s initial apprehension about not coming from a fashion background, the first week of class had him realizing his avid reading paid off. “I really had an edge and for the first time in my life, I was top of the class,” he says.

Two discoveries during his first internship in fashion left him gobsmacked — and hooked for good. The first was that trend forecasting was a job. The second was Colette, the now-defunct concept store in Paris.

His diploma in hand, the new graduate was barely settled into a new life in London working as a stylist when his alma mater called with an offer to teach fashion sociology back in Paris.

That’s where his life seemed to develop like a multitrack recording. For a decade he taught subjects ranging from the industry’s intersection with politics to marketing at institutions such as Sciences Po, the Institut Français de la Mode and the HEC business school.

In parallel, Nike hired him as consumer culture and innovation director, a “dream job” that involved being plugged into what was going on and meeting cool people, as he put it. He even was in a band, indie-rock act The Shoppings.

When his position was slated to be phased out in Paris eight years later, he opened his own consulting firm in 2012 — renamed REC in 2014 — keeping Nike as a client, and was offered the position of fashion and image director at sports newspaper L’Équipe to revamp its Sport & Style weekend supplement.

Sitting in the front row of top shows for the first time, it occurred to him that he’d made it to another of his younger self’s dream jobs, give or take a seat.

Now that Ephemera is permanent, Monfort is reworking the proportion of archival material, initially accounting for around 90 percent of the items. While he continues to source archival finds whenever he travels, new releases will grow to 30 to 40 percent of the offer.

Among them might soon be his memoir, which he is working on with the help of an author he knows. It’ll be a collection of his professional learnings, woven with personal anecdotes. Like Ephemera, he says it’s about sharing.  

“Today I can say that my motor in life is transmission. That’s why I started as a teacher, why I do consulting, why there’s Ephemera,” he says. “It offers a richness that is beyond anything.”