A Book Affair

Not only do fashion brands and publishers produce coffee table books and clutches like Olympia Le-Tan’s which feature book covers, the fashion is in love with literature and loves to show it.

Books and fashion have always gone hand in hand. Books retell history of the industry and its most important players. Then, we see the photos of models carrying a book around as their main accessory. Such is the caswe with the Hadid sisters: Gigi reads Albert Camus, while Bella reads Stephen King. Another model frequently seen on the streets with books is Kaia Gerber, whether it’s something classic like Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex or recent literary hits like Richard Powers’  The Overstory. In March 2020, Kaia launched a social media book club, debuting with a conversation on Sally Rooney’s Normal People with guests Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal, and has most recently hosted talks with Jane Fonda, Lena Dunham, and Emily Ratajkowski.  “I’d be reading books and talking about them with my friends, but we never set up anything formal, so when the pandemic happened—mostly out of boredom at first, to be honest—I wanted to create a space where people felt like they could talk about topics that were a little bit harder to broach on Instagram.”

Speaking of brands and literature, we can’t leave out Prada. In 2013, they launched their own literary contest, which gave poet Amanda Gorman an opportunity. Five years later, Loewe Classics was born, a collection of classics edited with a very stylish treatment: cloth bindings and printed sashes and photographs by Steven Meisel. This collection includes titles such as Wuthering Heights, Dracula and Don Quixote de la Mancha. A stylish, cultured investment for any library!

In 2019, Valentino started The Narratives campaign, which includes quotes from 17 authors to print across surfaces of cities around the world. And Chanel is not far behind. During 2021, and with the help of her ambassador, Charlotte Casiraghi, the brand organized a series of literary gatherings called Rendez-vous littéraire rue Cambon, which eventually turned into a podcast. Finally, Bottega Veneta created The Square Dubai, a cultural event with the Sudanese-British poet Asma Al Badawi. It’s an approach to the world of literature that shows us how the industry makes reading and culture fashionable.