Celebrities Flock to Los Angeles to Celebrate Montblanc’s Meisterstück Pen

Ryma Chikhoune
·3 min read
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John Legend dropped some news at Montblanc’s Los Angeles bash on Wednesday night, toasting the 100th anniversary of its emblematic Meisterstück pen. Sitting at the piano as the evening’s entertainment, the singer-songwriter hinted to an upcoming collaboration.

“How’s everybody doing tonight? You alright?” he said between playing his hits. “So good to be here tonight. In celebration! One hundred years of Meisterstück. Did I say it right?” He paused to laughs. “Thank you to my friends at Montblanc for inviting me here tonight. We’re going to do a lot of fun stuff together this year.”

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It’s a notable year for the Hamburg-based brand, which introduced its flagship pen in 1924. The company went all out for the occasion, taking over The Paramour Estate — the silent-film mansion sitting above Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake — for a 250-person dinner party. Face of the brand and international soccer star Zinédine Zidane was among those exploring its halls and rooms, which were transformed into mini Wes Anderson sets from his new Montblanc campaign film. The recreated designs served as photo-ops and a glimpse into scenes from the short, which was shown during the dinner.

“It’s ironic to me in a way that I should be here to celebrate this extraordinary company and the art of writing, because when I was a little boy my handwriting was so bad that my teachers were afraid I was going to fail my exams because the examiners wouldn’t be able to read the papers,” said actor Rupert Friend, who appears in the film alongside Jason Schwartzman and Anderson himself. While Anderson was MIA at the soirée (reportedly shooting a new project in Berlin), Schwartzman came out in support joined by another longtime Anderson collaborator, Waris Ahluwalia (who’s seen in another short video for the campaign, also featuring actors Maude Apatow, Lee Jinuk and Jing Boran).

After entering the cocktail hour, held poolside with a striking Meisterstück fountain pen sculpture floating at the center, the party meandered inside where a series of pens were exhibited like jewels inside glass displays. One sparkled the brightest, made in 1994 with 18-karat gold and 4654 diamonds.

“Imagine owning that,” mused a passerby.

It was an international set; Montblanc flew out many, including New York press, with guests including Apatow, Simu Liu, Callum Turner, Adrien Brody, Rodrigo Santoro, Laura Harrier, Emma Roberts, Keith Powers, Jannis Niewöhner, Emilia Schüle, Dori Sakurada, Esmeralda Pimentel and Lucky Blue Smith. The flow continued to the back of the estate where dinner was served outside, revealing a grand, Anderson-approved backdrop with a mustard-yellow carpet and ’70s-style wooden chalet as a stage (where two screens played a snowy Mont Blanc mountain in the Alps on loop). The menu kicked off with giant pretzels and a colorful lobster salad made with golden beets, pink radish and cucumber, followed by filet mignon and a pistachio financier dome with passion fruit-mango filling for dessert.

“I never actually thought of my handwriting as bad,” Friend went on, in front of the crowd. “It was just that my thoughts were going so much faster than my hand, which couldn’t really keep up. But I love the feeling of my hand moving across the page, my thoughts far in the distance, the pen racing to keep up. And here’s the thing about handwriting, if I were to write you an email or a text message, you would get the content of what I meant. But if I hand-wrote you a letter, you would know something about the man who wrote it — if you could read my handwriting.”

Launch Gallery: Emma Roberts, Adrien Brody, John Legend and More Attend Montblanc: 100 Years of Meiserstuck

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