Rejina Pyo’s Colorful Stationery Collab Is An Instant Mood Boost

If Korean fashion designer Rejina Pyo were to have an official life motto, it would probably go something like this: “Problem-solving is about being creative." She shared this bit of wisdom with R29 recently over the phone from her home base in London. She's had plenty of opportunities to be creative this year — the Central Saint Martins alumna recently became a second-time mother, moved houses, and readied her eponymous label for fashion week. And, after a successful collaboration with trendy retailer & Other Stories in 2021, Pyo is now joining fashion forces with another brand, the online paper goods purveyor Papier. Together they're launching a variety of stationery items designed to make the everyday a little more interesting — starting today.

“I think it’s a beautiful human activity,” Pyo says of her morning writing ritual, though she admits it's been less consistent due to the aforementioned baby. The practice involves stream of consciousness journaling guided by the best-selling book The Artist's Way. (Reese Witherspoon, Alicia Keys, and Kerry Washington are also fans.) But even outside of her routine, Pyo finds great value in the act of jotting down to-do lists, ideas, and sketches as a way of offloading a busy mind. “When you actually write [things] down, it’s all so much clearer.” 

It should come as no surprise that Pyo has partnered with Papier to create a collection of notebooks, notecards, planners, and list notepads (ranging from $29 to $55). Each one is inspired by the vibrant patterns, sculptural graphics, and mood-altering palettes that have solidified the designer's place on fashion radars across the globe. The customizable products are available on a made-to-order basis, and two of the notebook styles are made from upcycled leather.

While this may be the first time Pyo has transported the catwalk to our desktops, it’s not her first foray into stationery design. “When I was in university, my part-time job was designing stationery in Korea, so it’s kind of going back 20 years because the things that I designed, like a diary, were selling in [the British department store] Selfridges,” she shares. "I think in the bigger picture, these kinds of lifestyle products are designs that are meant to be used by people every day, and, in that sense, they’ve got lots of common threads [with my work in fashion].”

A sense of nostalgia is evident in the Papier prints, which Pyo describes as evocative of a memory. The wavy, spray-painted shapes and hazy, brush-stroke florals from her fall/winter 2022 ready-to-wear collection are the product of old-school analog design. There’s also a more abstract motif derived from the brand's initials that's got a hint of American painter Ellsworth Kelly in it. That pattern, in particular, allowed Pyo to get a head start on her fantasy of retiring to the mountains where she envisions spending her days painting and creating art “as a granny.”

In addition to these products being used for practical purposes, like organizing schedules and scribbling notes, Pyo also envisions their pages being filled with records of special moments and far-flung dreams, as she has always done — and continues to do — with her own journals. 

“Since moving to a new house, I've been opening up these boxes, and there are so many old notebooks from 20, 25 years ago. It’s like a time machine, you can show up and look through your past life in a glimpse,” she explains. More recently, Pyo has been taking note of the little things her 5-year-old says that she never wants to forget, so she can share them with him when he’s older. For parents to use a notebook in this way is "really a nice kind of gift for them," Pyo suggests.  

Whether you’ve got a problem to solve or a dream of your own to doodle about, give your thoughts a fashionable home and shop the Papier x Rejina Pyo collab, available now on Papier's website.