Plum Sykes’s Latest Novel Has Inspired a Line of Texting Stationary

In the dark days of the pandemic, when our phones or computer screens were often the fastest (or only) portals to human contact, Alexis Traina was struck by how limited it all was. There were those blue bubbles, the three pulsing dots, but there was little way to send a message with flair—and certainly nothing that came close to the individual appeal of a carefully chosen card or monogrammed stationary.

And so Traina, who has built a career in the wine business at her family’s Napa Valley winery, Swanson Vineyards, came up with HiNote, an app (complimentary in the app store) that lets you send messages with the kind of aesthetics more closely associated with physical stationary—a kind of Paperless Post (without all the RSVP machinery) that arrives via text. To Traina, this is long overdue: “There hasn’t been a mobile communication innovation since 2014. Communicators have been desperate for an easy, ready-to-use digital platform to send their best,” she says. Since the app launched, Traina has collaborated with a range of cultural authorities, ranging from designer Ken Fulk and Jill Kargman to Aerin Lauder and the Emily Post Institute. The latest collaborator is none other than Vogue contributing editor and novelist Plum Sykes.

“Darling, me and tech are like oil and water—never the twain shall meet,” Sykes tells me. “I am a total Luddite. But this app is so fresh, chic, and witty that it doesn’t feel like tech, it feels like fun. It’s absurdly easy to use, which is the game-changer for me.” Sykes describes how she was made to write letters as a child: “It was drilled into me that if I went to stay with someone, if I didn’t write and thank them, I’d never be invited back, and if someone gave me a birthday present, ditto. So I was a huge writer of thank-you letters. The rule was, the letter had to go to the other side of the page and then it was acceptable, and it had to be witty and amusing in some way.”

She finds texting a “a bit soulless, to be honest, rather mechanical, and often people don’t even say ‘Dear Plum’ or ‘Love From.’” The HiNote texts, on the other hand, have a lot of character. “I love that you can do things like send someone your contact details on a text which resembles the most beautiful Smythson stationery. Or send them a message saying ‘Call Me’ with just an old dial-up phone as the image. Believe me, everyone calls you that second!” Her “hero note” channels the idea of “a very old-school, proper piece of note paper, with a manor house engraved in maroon ink at the top, and instead of writing your name under it, as one traditionally would, and address, we just put ‘LADY OF THE FUCKING MANOR.’ It’s just so funny, and very much chimes with my latest book, Wives Like Us.”

Indeed, the new collection from HiNote features cameos from the book—a note delivered in the voice of Ian, the butler character from Wives Like Us, for example. “It was lovely to take that line that Ian often says in the book, ‘Consider it done,’ and see that old-fashioned Wodehousian attitude as part of this amazingly modern supertool, with the old-school Gucci loafers, all wrapped up into a wizzy, delicious, cutting-edge package,” says Sykes.

“Plum was instrumental in every single detail of this collection,” says Traina, “pulling from the incredible elements of her everyday life—the perfect cranberry toile wallpaper in her bedroom, a silver canapé tray from her pantry, her gorgeous riding kit, her treasured robin’s egg blue Aga that sits proudly in her kitchen, and even her daily driver, a battered green Land Rover.” All of it amounts to digital stationary that summons an entire world—cheeky, irreverent, and perfectly curated.