All the hot girls are reading books. If you’ve seen Gigi Hadid photographed with a copy of Albert Camus’ “The Stranger,” or Kaia Gerber wearing a pink baby tee that says “Hot/Can Read,” you’ll understand where I’m coming from. The fashion It Girls of our generation are all posing next to bookshelves on Instagram or reading feminist essay collections in their bikinis, indicating an important shift in cultural currency. The fashion world has developed a new archetype: the literary It Girl.
Fashion and literature have always been intertwined, primarily as means of self-expression. To quote Virginia Woolf, “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm.” Both books and clothes are taste indicators, outlets for us to translate our personalities into something digestible for the public eye. The idea of the book as a status symbol has been promoted throughout history, again and again. Vivienne Westwood has even said, “A status symbol is a book. A very easy book to read is The Catcher in the Rye. Walk around with that under your arm, kids. That is status.” We see this now, on the Instagram feeds and in paparazzi photos of models and celebrities like Kendall Jenner and the Hadid sisters. The book has become an accessory, an extension of the communication of one’s persona.
In the last decade, we’re finding books everywhere, especially in fashion. Most notably, Miu Miu has started their summer reads program, which gifts visitors copies of books like Alba de Céspedes “Forbidden Notebook,” Sibilla Aleramo’s “A Woman” and Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”. On the runway, we see literary influence ranging from classics like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (Thom Browne RTW Fall 2024) and Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” (Fendi SS21) to new works like Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” (Valentino SS24) and dedicated flash fiction stories from Ottessa Moshfegh (Proenza Schouler AW22). Skall Studio’s AW24 collection was even entirely dedicated to the bookish styles of iconic writers.
Now, the literary It Girl has always existed. We must recognize this new cultural persona as drawing inspiration from the great female writers of the 60s and 70s, specifically Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. Though Didion and Babitz differed in style and outlook, they both became icons of California in their time. Babitz was free-spirited and glamorous, most well known for her partially fictionalized memoirs. Didion had a unique journalistic flair, publishing collections of nonfiction and fiction alike. However, the gap between women in fashion and women who write was bridged by Didion as she posed for a Celine ad in 2015 wearing sunglasses and a black long sleeve. She became not only a revered author, but a cultural icon–a symbol of ultimate intellect and style.
The new literary It Girl, though, is not necessarily a writer. She is something of a model or influencer, she runs or participates in an Instagram book club (not unlike Kaia Gerber’s Library Science or Dua Lipa’s Service95). She reads the Didion and Babitz classics; she embodies the idea of coquetteish style juxtaposing her inherent intellectualism. She broadcasts this persona to the masses, she carries her newest read in her bag and boasts her bookshelf on social media. The literary It Girl has become not a girl who writes books, but rather a girl who uses books to her social advantage.
This is not to demonize the literary It Girl. Social currency is something we all carry, a system we all participate in. No one is free from their own persona, and it’s impossible to ignore the status that intellectualism carries. Reading has historically been used as a way of declaring autonomy, specifically by women who were denied such privileges. Knowledge, after all, is power. This begs the question–can we blame the influencers and models for posing with books, for assuming the literary persona? For so desperately trying to reclaim the intellectualism that society has stripped from them?
The new literary It Girl, at her core, defies expectations. She is scholarly yet soft, well-read yet chic–juxtaposed in a way that brings her a unique power. Both fashion and taste in literature assume primary roles of personal curation. The fashion It Girl and the literary icon are no longer mutually exclusive, and no longer free from the influence of social media and popular culture. But maybe the merging of the fashion It Girl and the literary It Girl indicates something larger: a desire to be seen, to be known, and most importantly, to be respected.
Words and Graphic by Avery Melhado