There is something seemingly anachronistic about celebrating one hundred years of leather goods in 2026. We live in an era in which everything seems to become lighter, faster, more immaterial. Documents end up in the cloud, notes on smartphones, memories in the endless rolls of our phones. Yet there are still objects that continue to resist this dematerialization. A bag, for example. It is never just a bag. It is a container of journeys, habits, workdays, meetings, obsessions. It is one of the few objects that accompanies the different versions of ourselves.
When we met Marco Tomasetta to talk about the 100 years of Montblanc leather goods, I expected a conversation about craftsmanship, heritage and design. We certainly talked about that too. But what struck me most was something else: cinema, paper and a letter.
Tomasetta talks about creativity the way one talks about places one would like to return to. His sources of inspiration are not so much trends or market strategies, but rather films, journeys, archives and memories. It is therefore not surprising that one of the most important creative relationships built in recent years has been the one with Wes Anderson. According to Tomasetta, the American director was among the few who truly understood the Montblanc archive. Not only for aesthetic reasons, but for a shared sensitivity. The same colours, the same fascination for the 1950s and 1960s, the same way of building worlds suspended between nostalgia and imagination.
When Tomasetta arrived at Montblanc, the brand was perceived mostly through black and white. Thanks also to Anderson’s gaze, that universe opened up to a new dimension made of colour, depth and lightness. The intellectuality remained, but a certain rigidity dissolved. A world was born that is more cultural than corporate, more emotional than institutional.
It is very rare today to hear someone talk about creativity as a space to be protected. Not to be optimised. Not to be monetised. To be protected. Perhaps this is also why Tomasetta decided to create a printed publication that will be released twice a year. Not a catalogue, nor a simple communication tool, but a personal territory where artists, photographers and collaborators can dialogue freely. A space in which the creative process regains the same value as the final result.
His insistence on paper appears almost counter-current. In a historical moment in which every content is consumed in a matter of seconds, printing means slowing down. It means giving ideas physical weight. It means creating something that can be preserved, forgotten and perhaps rediscovered years later. And it is precisely here that the conversation returned, almost naturally, to the essence of Montblanc. Writing. Not as a function, but as an emotional gesture.
Among the most precious objects kept by Tomasetta there is a letter that his father wrote to his mother. A simple sheet of paper that, years later, retains a value that is impossible to quantify. Not so much for what it says, but for what it represents: the tangible proof that someone was there, that they found the time to stop and leave a trace. A bag can cross a century. A notebook can cross a century. A letter can cross a century. What survives is never just the object, but the meaning we entrust to it.
For this reason, in the end, the one hundred years of Montblanc leather goods do not really speak of leather goods. They speak of the things we choose to preserve. Of the memories we decide to carry with us. And of those small fragments of life that continue to tell us who we are, even long after everything else has been forgotten.