Make way for the internet-deemed literary ‘hot girl’. She’s an intellectual: after attending her 10:00am lecture she places her laptop in her Shakespeare & Co tote bag, where she grabs a coffee on the way to Waterstones, ending the day posting her latest purchase of a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. As an English Literature student, I often love embodying this lifestyle however it’s important to recognise the consumerist tendencies that it encourages.
With the rise of book sales, totalling 198.6 million copies in the UK’s 2023 market, luxury fashion has embraced the appeal of the literary ‘it’ girl. Chanel, as ELLE reports, worked with Cliveden Literary Festival in 2023 to spotlight independent bookshops and Valentino additionally sponsored the 2024 Booker Prize ceremony. Books have even made it to the runway where Skall Studio, as part of their Fall 2024 collection, had models holding ‘notebooks and papers.’ We live in an age where celebrities even want to you to join their book club ranging from Dua Lipa’s Service95, Dakota Johnson’s TeaTime and Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf (my personal favourite being The Laufey Book Club). This has given rise to, as T Magazine published, the ‘celebrity book stylist’ whose sole occupation is to select novels and essay collections for celebrities lacking their own literary tastes, so that through their stylish accessories, that they will be photographed clutching, the viewer can surmise their character in a positive academic light.
Books then have become integrated as part of our personal identity. As Frank Furedi writes in his article entitled Book objects, ‘In physical space, book-objects can curate identity’ where what you are seen reading, more so than the act of reading itself, acts as indicators of cultural refinement. In our pursuit of self-marketisation, we create, as he states, ‘a reading scene’ where the prop of the book acts as an instrumental tool to display our desired look to peers.
He illustrates that:
‘When a sixteen-year-old girl takes a picture of The Bell Jar, the edition with the rose, next to her coffee on the glass table on her parents’ balcony on a cloudy day, she’s creating a reading scene, permanently capturing her moment of reading and also saying that this is how she reads.’
However, what if instead of her reading The Bell Jar, she is instead seen reading Tessa Dare’s Romancing the Duke?
In exploring the use of books as fashion accessories, it becomes apparent that only certain types of literature are elevated as these props. You’ll never find a grocery-sold romance for instance in the hands of a famous celebrity. The book acts then as a ‘status symbol’, as Vivienne Westwood stated, where she notes ‘A very easy book to read is The Catcher in the Rye. Walk around with that under your arm, kids. That is status.’ Similar to how the fashion industry has historically perpetuated elitist tendencies in upholding codes of exclusivity, as with the rise of the fashion critic, there is a highbrow vs lowbrow delegation of literature where texts deemed as inferior, often feminised, non-white, working-class literature, are aligned with connotations of vulgarity. Moreover, the physical print is valued over a digital one due to its cultural capital it evokes. In the age of social media therefore, it has been stressed to prioritise the public face and how it promotes your curated brand: judge a book by its cover.
In posing with our selected fiction, we are performing for a perceived audience through a materialistic lens. In Maria Popova’s seminal article entitled Aesthetic Consumerism and the Violence of Photography she identifies how our feed curation reflect our ‘ultimate attempt to control, frame, and package our lives’ for others and ‘even to ourselves’. Afterall, if someone wore a cute outfit and read a book but no one took a picture, did it even happen at all?
The glamorisation of reading, however, can also provide a place of solace (think Dark Academia for example, with its towers of books, blazers, cardigans and cups of coffee) where its romanticisation of intellectualism can be essential for a struggling student trying to make it through the Michaelmas term. Popova herself remarks that such photography can assuage ‘general feelings of disorientation’ and act as a ‘self-soothing tool against the anxiety of “inefficiency”’, a mode very useful as we transition into the routine of university.
Books as fashionable accessories can even be considered as an important weapon in a countercultural movement; as novelist Micheal Donker stresses, ‘We live in such noisy societies now, and we’re rediscovering the power of quietness’. If the ‘book-object’ therefore has the ability to make people cling onto the medium of reading as part of their identity, then I would argue it remains invaluable.
Despite the problematic implications that the aestheticisation of books embody, I still plan to match my outfits to my books and take supposedly candid photos of my literature next to my little trinkets, as I honestly prefer this timeline as opposed to one where the act of reading becomes stigmatised and we have no autonomy over the media we consume. However, it’s important while partaking in this phenomenon that we remain conscious of our constant accumulation by supporting our libraries, reading digitally and buying second-hand, as well as remaining critical of internet discourse.