Books Are the New Luxury Item
I recently heard something on an episode of the Business of Fashion podcast that I think is worth mentioning. Two of their reporters were talking about how books have become fashion's favourite flex, book clubs, salon events, campaign imagery built around literature, and they said something that stuck with me, that books were basically being productised by fashion itself. Reading rates are dropping and the image of a reader has never looked more aspirational.
Think about it. If everyone's reading less, why would a book, or the image of one, become the thing brands reach for to signal taste? I think it's because reading is now one of the few things you genuinely cannot fake in a hurry. You can buy a hard cover. You cannot buy the hundred hours it takes to actually finish Ulysses. Anyone can screenshot a beautiful sentence, but sitting with an entire book, start to finish, not skipping to the end, has become almost suspiciously rare. Which is exactly what makes it feel expensive.
Jonathan Anderson's first Dior campaign was a tote bag wearing a Dracula first edition, unveiled during the men's show last June and photographed on Rihanna within days. By January it was in boutiques as part of The Book Cover Collection, a full run of Dior's best selling Book Tote reskinned as Madame Bovary, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, even a cream version lifted from Christian Dior's own 1956 autobiography. The bags were sold out in some sizes before they had technically launched.
Balenciaga became the first fashion house to join Substack's new native sponsorship programme in June, meaning the brand now puts money directly behind individual newsletter writers rather than buying ads around them. CEO Gianfranco Gianangeli framed it as an extension of the house's history of backing "bold voices". Balenciaga has had a Substack presence since last July, live streamed a runway show through it, and now, per multiple reports, is treating the platform less like PR and more like an ongoing cultural feed.
Chanel did the same thing years earlier. Virginie Viard's first solo couture collection for the house, shown days after Karl Lagerfeld's death, turned the Grand Palais into a two tier library. Lagerfeld had owned thousands of books, so the room read as a memorial whether the brand called it one or not. The press release described Viard herself as an eternal book lover, and the clothes followed the brief literally: tweed in the colours of vellum and printer's paper, collars folded to look like a spine left half open, wire framed glasses on chains for what one line called a woman eager for culture, poetry and novels.
Loewe has subtly been doing the most sustained version of this since 2018, when Anderson wrapped a run of literary classics, Wuthering Heights, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in cloth bound sleeves shot by Steven Meisel. That instinct became LOEWE Issue, the house's ongoing magazine, now past its tenth edition, thick enough to double as an art object.
Talking about fashion icons, Dua Lipa built an actual library. The Manifesto Library opened inside Porto's Livraria Lello in late June, the first physical home of her Service95 Book Club, tucked into a cultural auditorium. A hundred books organised around power, control, voice and memory, Atwood and Rushdie and Tokarczuk among them, several of them banned somewhere at some point. Dua Lipa called it a shrine. It’s no longer the literacy that makes one show high status, but rather the courage to show interest for those books that can stir the pot. After all, luxury has always pursued individuality and new perspectives.
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None of this is happening because reading is up. Fewer people finish a book cover to cover now, so having done it, or looking like you have, is more of a flex than it used to be. It’s a productisation of literature by fashion itself, BookTok being the main accelerant, an entire online subculture that turned reading into something visible and communal again, which then fed straight back into the physical objects and the stores selling them.
The split between the ones that will last and the ones that will not comes down to whether there is anything underneath the object. Houses with a genuine, longstanding relationship to literature, Prada's work with authors and scholars, Chanel funding an actual library at a Shanghai museum, Dua Lipa giving space to the forbidden voices, will keep doing it once the trend cools. The ones that took it performatively will move on the moment something else signals depth better.