Fashion Is Falling Back in Love With Books

alizetuncel
Aug 16
5 min read

Fashion has always borrowed from literature.

A novel in a collection note. A character behind a silhouette. A line of poetry setting the mood for a campaign. For years, books mostly worked as references: elegant, useful, often half-hidden.

Now the relationship feels more deliberate.

Fashion houses are hosting literary clubs, opening bookshops, commissioning texts, publishing catalogues and turning reading lists into part of their public language. Literature gives fashion a way to attach cultural capital and intellectual identity to its image-making.

It points to a wider search for depth in a culture where looking good is no longer enough; the image is expected to come with references, context and a point of view.

Image: SL Editions Books by Saint Laurent

Reading Becomes Public Material

People never stopped reading. But when a celebrity arrives somewhere fashionable with a book in hand people start paying attention differently.

Reading comes out from the private shelf and enters the fashion conversation.

BookTok made that visible on a much larger scale. Last year, books recommended by the #BookTok community sold more than 50 million copies across Europe, generating €800 million in revenue across key book markets, according to analysis from NielsenIQ BookData and Media Control shared by TikTok.

That figure helps explain why fashion is watching reading culture again. A recommendation can move books, create a mood around a title and turn readers into tastemakers.

Dua Lipa is a useful example because fashion already pays attention to her style and the way she edits her public persona. Through Service95, reading became part of that persona. This year, Service95 partnered with Livraria Lello in Porto to launch the Manifesto Library, a permanent collection dedicated to banned and censored books.

When someone with that level of visibility builds a library, reading stops looking like a niche hobby. It becomes a public-facing part of cultural identity.

Image: Manifesto Library and Dua Lipa

Slower Formats Have New Value

There is also a business reason this feels timely.

According to McKinsey & Company and BoF’s annual State of Fashion report, the industry’s digital momentum has become harder to rely on. After the pandemic, consumers returned to physical stores while e-commerce lost speed. Digital advertising costs rose by 24 percent, customer acquisition costs increased by 60 percent, and return on advertising spend fell by 44 percent. The digital fashion market also lost $700 million in value in 2023, with slower growth expected between 2024 and 2026.

Creative direction is starting to absorb that need for slower attention. Vogue recently pointed to Rachel Scott’s Spring 2026 work for Proenza Schouler, where the show notes included a reading list of French feminist theory, from Hélène Cixous to Luce Irigaray. Before her first full creative-director debut, the list already framed the kind of thinking that would sit behind the clothes.

This is where literary culture becomes strategically useful. It gives fashion a format for longer attention without turning the brand into a lecture. It lets a house hold a conversation around ideas and references that can outlive a single product cycle.

Images: Rachel Scott and Spring 2026 work for Proenza Schouler

Miu Miu Turns Literature Into a Scene

Miu Miu Literary Club shows how naturally a fashion house can turn reading into a live cultural format.

For its 2025 Milan edition, Miu Miu staged A Woman’s Education during Milan Design Week at the Circolo Filologico Milanese, a historic institution dedicated to languages and civilizations. Vogue described an atmosphere built around readings, panels and performances, with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables and Fumiko Enchi’s The Waiting Years at the centre of the programme. The selected works opened conversations around social expectations and the ways women’s inner lives have been written, controlled or misunderstood.

For 2026, Miu Miu continued the Literary Club in Milan under the title Politics of Desire, with Annie Ernaux and Ama Ata Aidoo among the selected authors. The programme also introduced a curated library by Rosi Braidotti and opened the Circolo Filologico as a reading room for the public on an additional day.

That last detail is important for the brand’s positioning. Miu Miu is building a cultural scene that feels aligned with its own codes: women’s voices, intelligence, contradiction, youth, desire, performance. The books are doing real thematic work. They bring the brand into conversations that already have intellectual and social weight.

Olga Campofreda’s comment captures the mood well: the point is accepting the limits of the digital world. A literary club gives Miu Miu a place for slower, more considered exchange, while still keeping the energy of a fashion event.

Images: Miu Miu Literary Club and Olga Campofreda

Saint Laurent and the Edited Shelf

On Rue de Grenelle in Paris, Saint Laurent created a space dedicated to rare books, out-of-print publications, records and editions selected under Anthony Vaccarello’s direction. Wallpaper describes Babylone as a cultural space for art, books and music, with readings, signings and live music planned around it.

Babylone is powerful because it shows Saint Laurent’s references in physical form. The shelves say something the clothes do not need to spell out: which photographers, writers, artists, musicians and printed objects belong near the house.

This is where independent bookstore partnerships and café-bookstore hybrids enter the conversation. They give fashion a softer point of entry than the boutique. Someone can browse, sit, read, drink coffee, discover a title. The relationship starts to feel closer to cultural habit than purchase intent.

For luxury, that is a useful form of proximity. A customer may visit a store occasionally, but a bookshop or café-bookstore space gives them a reason to spend more time inside the brand’s cultural orbit.

Images: Saint Laurent Babylone, Paris

Prada Writes, Loewe Records

Prada’s literary use works through character and psychological tension.

For its Spring/Summer 2025 Acts Like Prada campaign, Prada commissioned Ottessa Moshfegh to write Ten Protagonists, a series of texts inspired by Carey Mulligan’s campaign characters. Prada describes each still as expanding through Moshfegh’s words into a fully realised heroine.

That is a very Prada move. The campaign image becomes a starting point for interior life. The viewer is asked to imagine what the woman knows, hides, performs or refuses. Text gives the image an aftertaste.

Loewe’s use of print belongs to another register. Through the LOEWE Foundation, the house supports poetry, dance, photography, art and craft, while its catalogues and publications document cultural projects around craft and heritage.

For Loewe, publication works like record-keeping. Craft is slow by nature, and print helps give that slowness a durable form. A catalogue can hold the maker, the process and the object together after an exhibition or prize has ended.

Prada uses writing to deepen a character. Loewe uses publishing to preserve a practice. These are very different strategies, which is exactly why literary culture has become so flexible for fashion.

Images: Acts Like Prada campaign and Loewe Foundation’s Publication

What Literary Culture Gives Fashion

Fashion’s return to books says a lot about the kind of status luxury wants now.

A look can travel quickly. A reference asks for time. A reading list, a literary club, a publishing project or a bookshop lets a brand attach itself to knowledge, attention and intellectual identity without relying only on price or visibility.

There is still performance in all of this. A book in the front row can be styled. A reading list can be edited like a wardrobe. A literary event can serve a brand strategy.

But the performance is part of the story.

Literary culture gives fashion a way to make cultural capital visible. It lets brands act as hosts, editors, publishers and guides. It gives the image somewhere to go after it has been seen. The collection still matters. But the literary reference tells us what kind of mind the collection wants to have.