2025

It’s cyclical, of course. Just like everything else in an industry built on tidal movements between newness and banality. In the ever-more bustling marketplace of images and signs, fashion once again turns to literature to lend itself an air of legitimacy and permanence in an appeal to a culture grown bored of ephemerality. 

Over the past year, we’ve seen books emerge as a leading signifier in the fashion industry. It should come as no surprise that one of our usual suspects, the Prada Group, takes the lead with the Miu Miu Summer Reads program and a SS’25 campaign bolstered by cool-girl author Otessa Mosfegh. Model Kaia Gerber runs a book club (and retail venture) called Library Science; the book in Kendall Jenner’s hand at any given moment is the subject of an account called What’s Kendall Reading.

Proximity to the literary world is hardly a new strategy. The past twenty years of massified luxury have already given us Marc Jacobs’ Bookmarc, Karl Lagerfeld’s 7L, and CHANEL’s RDV Littéraire, to name a few. Most often, these initiatives offer the dual benefit of reinforcing a House’s cultural positioning while serving as a relatively agile gifting vertical.

There’s a certain aura to literature that lends itself particularly well to fashion Houses with an intellectual bent. The semiotic interface between a visual medium (clothing) and the written word demands a certain translation that’s perhaps less obvious than, say, images in a film - reaffirming emotional engagement by making clients feel they’re one to “get it.” Literature lends a sense of depth, a peak behind the current, to an industry drained by images and in desperate need of substance.

Then there’s the way we engage with literature. Reading is a solitary activity, and fundamentally private. It’s slow and quiet in a world where both of these concepts are inaccessible luxuries to many. There’s an intimacy to it: interacting with a brand at the level of our internal monologues. 

And for building a brand, authors themselves are as good of an archetype as any. Living authors, like Mosfegh, embody the kind of intellect and substance that’s become a status signifier amongst a creative-ish class of HENRYs and HNWI. Dead ones, like de Beauvoir, help affirm brand positioning in historical context and validate brand discourse about femininity and power.

After art, cinema, and music, literature is the last - and perhaps most powerful - battleground for capturing the cultural imagination. But it’s an endless challenge to remain at the top of the wave, or risk falling into banality.

The rise of the coffee table book is an excellent illustration. 

There’s always been a pretty natural pipeline between one visual medium to another. The fashion image lends itself well to zines, revues, and coffee table books - often created by the same people responsible for branded stylistic and editorial content in general. 

Publishers like Rizzoli and Assouline have built fortunes on the trade of what has become, essentially, very wordy home decor. In part, this is due to the new visibility of the home - social media and indeed, Covid-era video conferencing, have thrown open the last remaining curtains between public and private life. As ever-more intimate spheres become realms of public consumption and expression, new markets open up. Literature begets access to the most private sphere of all, that of the intellect. 

The fact that Zara Home now has an entire section devoted to fashion fashion revues and coffee table books should tell us all we need to know about the flow of status in this context.

Semiotic capital no longer moves downward, but outward: in a world where structured, institutional notions of high and low culture no longer apply, cachet is born in the epicenter of the cultural industry, then becomes distilled and massified until the very objects that once served a functional purpose in its enactment (books of images) become commodities. Today, Zara Home sells books about historic French Houses, with some Margiela and McQueen in the mix. Mark my words: by 2028, they’ll be about Rick Owens. 

In this context, fashion brands have every interest in positioning themselves as cultural producers - at the epicenter of semiotic capital, the decision makers - rather than as historic institutions whose prescriptive power is waning. 

As clients and as consumers, it’s tempting to imagine that this sort of initiative presents a “way out” of the cultural vacuum of late-capitalist consumption. Perhaps, on some level, that’s true. But on some level, it increasingly feels like we’re trying to search for meaning by gazing into the mirrors held up to society by cultural producers - only to find nothing but ourselves staring back.

It reminds me a bit of the “quiet luxury” phenomenon which is, thank god, finally disappearing from trend reports. On the surface, it was a rejection of logo-forward, ostentatious displays of wealth at a moment when the conversation about global inequality was coming to the forefront, and the cursor of social status moved towards subtle, “if you know, you know” luxury. Lest we forget, there was a moment in the late 2010’s and early 2020’s when moral superiority was a predicator of value.

Whether “Quiet Luxury” was actually a new aesthetic mode or simply a mass-cultural awakening to Veblian sociologies of dress, it quickly became positioned as an anecdote to the immorality of overconsumption which placed luxury beyond reproach by sanitizing it, then enshrouding it in an ahistoric imagination. This had the inverse effect of revalorizing the consumer choices of the wealthy as enlightened, thus perpetuating the same trickle-down effect they purported to dismantle. 

A host of signifiers of wealth were thus placed in the hands of mass consumers, who could participate in fashionability with a whiff of cultural capital. Was it a coincidence that these garments are the simplest - and cheapest - for fashion companies to produce? 

Those very signifiers - the cable knits, the suede loafers, the blue and white stripes - reached saturation, then became banal and undesirable. They were on sale at Zara last season, and are in a landfill by now. Meanwhile, we all continue to complain that fashion is boring, and being killed by dupe culture. 

In short, while it’s appealing to regard Cultural Initiatives as a means of engaging in some higher mode of consumption, we’re still simply gazing in the mirror, back at ourselves. Creativity isn’t dead - consumer culture is. 

But this is, of course, the world we live in. And it would be reductive to argue that culture produced by corporations has any less meaning, any less socio-emotional impact, than some supposed “real” thing. In post-modernity, authenticity is a mirage. The institutions are dying or dead; Western culture is produced, enacted, and commodified in a megalithic structure. It’s not that the gatekeepers aren’t losing ground to the masses - rather, culture is being absorbed by capitalism. 

In this context - and I am being dead serious - who better than Miu Miu to tell us what it means to be a woman? What better definition than that found around a roundtable discussion amongst the creative elites, accompanied by an archetypal silhouette and cross-category product strategy? 

Maybe that’s overly cynical. But I do think we’ll have to look away from the mirror, from time to time, and remember that the best way to find meaning in any of it is to refuse to take it too seriously. 

The idea that private sector actors should be patrons of culture is not new - as Natasha Degan rightly argues in her book Merchants of Style, the idea that “culture” is a public good is actually a recent, and perhaps ultimately short-lived phenomenon. And it should be said that encouraging people to read is hardly the worst thing to come out of late-stage capitalism.

Literature has always been a lens for understanding the world around us - and if it can help us explore post-modernity as we live it, with and alongside brands, then fashion certainly has a place in the discourse.