Are the Latest It-Bags…Books?

Bibliophiles unite; book gal (or boy) summer is in session!

Jacob Elordi LV Speedy

Dear reader, I have a confession to make.

Even though I’m perpetually poring over vintage Vogue or hunched over early-aughts issues of Harper’s Bazaar or wafting through the pages of W Magazine or scrolling through the Instagrams of @gettyimagesfanclub or @tomfordforgucci or simply in the act of constantly consuming information in general, it appears that yours truly, the once avid reader that he were, has lost his edge when it comes to the perusal of a good book.

Of course, I’m not alone in this. 

“brainrot” (in all lowercase), after all, proved to be the winning contender for Oxford Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year. And what with these incessant screens pulping our minds down to paste, it’s hardly surprising that the last book I actually finished was a rather spicy paperback.

And yet, just when the longform text seemed to have been relegated to the bookworm’s backroom, like angels descended from the seven heavens, Bella and Gigi Hadid showed up, each with a hefty hardback in tow.

“Books!” exclaimed The New York Post, “you know, those antiquated, analog vessels of information usually associated with smart people, like Emma Watson.” GQ added, “When beautiful people read books, the world goes mad.” 

Yet, as infuriating as the idea is that someone could be both *very* attractive and *vaguely* literary to those “nerdy, writerly types who want to maintain intellectual superiority over those hotter than themselves,” it appears that books have indeed come to garner quite the cultural cache.

So much so, in fact, that they’re now the new it-accessory in town!

Hot Girls (or Guys) & Hot Books

Kaia Gerber walks down the streets of Los Angeles. She wears a white button-down, black pants, black loafers, a camel trench coat, and a monogrammed Celine purse. Kendall Jenner adjusts her bikini bottoms while vacationing at a beach in Barbados. Dakota Johnson sits for an interview with Bustle but “simply will not promote her wannabe-blockbuster movie, Madame Web” (or clarify her claims “both to love and to be allergic to limes”), and Paul Mescal sits alone in a pub, gin and tonic in hand, phone charging on the nearby table.

What do these seemingly disparate (but highly Instagrammable) moments in pop culture have in common? Why books, of course!

Kaia Gerber With a Book
Kaia Gerber with a book
Maryam Nassir Zadeh Fall 2022
Author Ottessa Moshfegh walks for Maryam Nassir Zadeh AW22, image via Vogue Runway

In Gerber’s hands is Simple Passion, Annie Ernaux’s “memoir of an unrequited love.” Kendall’s choice of a beach read is Joan Didion’s not-so-beachy Year of Magical Thinking. Johnson’s pick was Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, while Mescal’s is Stoner by John Williams, “the kind of paperback,” writes Elle, “you want your date to slide into the pocket of their jeans when you arrive at the bar five minutes late.”

If you thought you couldn’t be both intellectually curious and aesthetically curated, think again, because it appears that books are the arm-candy of preference – or rather, a highbrow thirst-trap – in tinsel-town as of late. 

And everyone from Jacob Elordi (whose brand-new Speedy P9 paled in comparison to the paperback of Prima Facie in his hand) to Kim Kardashian (whose book club never met again after its first discussion) is in on the trend. So much so, in fact, that Sydney Sweeney’s character in The White Lotus, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in hand, retorts, “We have a stylist pick our outfits and then we have a book stylist pick out our books.”

Move over hot girl walks, now we’re in the age of the hot girl books, one that has its own category on Goodreads to boot!

The (Olympia Le Tan)talizing World of Book Bags

But it isn’t just the Oprahs and the Kaias of the world who have their own celebrity book clubs and celebrity book stylist-approved reading lists.

Luxury fashion, too, has embraced the bibliophile girlies with open arms. 

Miu Miu, for instance, hosted literary salons championing feminist Italian literature, while Chanel’s was led by Charlotte Casiraghi and featured Tilda Swinton. Valentino partnered with Emma Roberts’ book club Belletrist, and Dior launched its aptly named Book Tote Club under Madame Maria Grazia. Of course, it escaped no one that Jonathan Anderson’s menswear debut for Dior also had the Book Tote emblazoned with highly recognizable titles like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

Rihanna Dior Book Tote
Books have inspired and themselves become an accessory
SJP Filming AJLT Carrying a Book

But the book has long spilled out of its pages and onto the runway. 

From Elsa Triolet and Mary Shelley’s influence on Elsa Schiaparelli and Alexander McQueen (respectively) to Kim Jones at Fendi and Ian Griffith at Max Mara drawing inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (also respectively), Kim Jones later went on to style Dior Men AW22 to the tune of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, and “thirsty” Parisian menswear label Louis Gabriel Nouchi was known to title each of his collections after a seminal French novel.

Books also have their own place in the world of the bag addict. Kate Spade’s Contents is a voyeuristic fever dream that digs into the insides of famous people’s purses (Helen Gurley Brown swore by leopard-printed tissues in her bag, while The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison never kept a mirror inside hers).

Yale Review Canvas Tote
The Yale Review’s “book-sized tote.” Image via Elle.

Even when it comes to the silhouette of the purse itself, the uber-practical “book-sized tote” – “to just carry with you the book you’re reading, your wallet and maybe one other thing,” explains Will Frazier, digital director and managing editor of The Yale Review – has been steadily on the rise.

But perhaps the most overt manifestation of the books-as-bags movement has been Olympia Le Tan, whose famously embroidered, famously-pricey collectors’ clutches (inspired by her father’s private collection) retail for upwards of $1,700 and are available in appropriately moody titles like J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye or William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies.

The Best Bags of NYFW Day 3 7
Olympia Le Tan’s Novelty Book-Clutch

Performative Reading and Performative Purses

Yet, there’s also something to be said about how photogenic the book is as an accessory. This has fuelled the rise of #booktok and #bookstagram, transcending its purpose to become yet another status symbol. 

In Vivienne Westwood’s words, “A very easy book to read is The Catcher in the Rye. Walk around with that under your arm, kids. That is status.”

Agnolo Bronzino’s portrait of Dante Alighieri
Agnolo Bronzino’s portrait of Dante Alighieri & Eve Arnold’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe. Image via Cosmo.
Marilyn Monroe with a Book
Image via Time Magazine.

So, while Eve Arnold’s 1955 portrait of blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe and Agnolo Bronzino’s 1532 portrait of (neither blonde nor bombshell) Dante Alighieri exhibits both in the company of books (the former of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the latter of his self-authored Paradiso) to imply a particular intellectual mettle, the act of publicly reading in itself has become performative.

“Ladies are draping their bodies across a swath of opened books like some sort of Abrahamic sacrifice to the gods of paper and ink,” writes Vulture.

And to quote that popularly typified “type of guy” TikTok: “when you’re at the performative reading competition and the tote bag guy shows up,” it (sadly) tells very little about your own reading preferences if you simply materialize with a copy of Infinite Jest or The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Penguin Modern Classics: “Think of them as the Uniqlo of book covers: good as dependable basics, but not worth basing your personality on.”)

The written text, it appears, has become the latest frontier of aesthetic curation, in the vein of a The Row Margaux, vintage Levi’s 501, or a Labubu charm. And celebrities and brands alike are banking on them to score pop-culture points, the way “a former Disney teen might guest star on Law & Order SVU as a murder suspect in order to graduate to more mature roles.”

At the end of the day, reading is an exercise meant (for the most part) to be enjoyed, and only occasionally to declare yourself Better Than Them. And like a status satchel, it’s only human of us to get a little cheeky and performative with our reading material.

All that being said, happy reading! 

Featured image via Jacob Elordi

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Arete

They are basic necessities of life to me! I must have one on me at all times and it must be real paper. I’m glad they’re having a moment ❤

Julie

have you seen the IG @hotdudesreading ? 🙂

Allie

I just checked it out! 😍

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