Why is fashion so into books right now?
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2024
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We think of fashion and reading as almost polar opposites: one is about creating an image, the other a kind of internal journey. But a number of recent fashion collections have been inspired by books, including by Hanya Yanagihara, Edgar Allan Poe, and Agatha Christie. Fashion brands are producing literature podcasts and hosting salons. And in interior design, TikTok’s latest trend is bookshelf wealth. On today’s episode, writer Simon Chilvers talks us through what’s behind the rise of literary fashion.
Links:
– Simon Chilvers’ piece, ‘Fashion’s Love For Literature’: https://on.ft.com/3Iu1vlD
– And another great piece by Simon on fashion in literature: https://on.ft.com/48HiqMd
– ‘Bookshelf wealth is the oldest decorating trick in the book’: https://on.ft.com/49K2dYb
– Simon is on Instagram @schilvers3 and X @simonchilvers
– Simon also wants to see the fashion world embracing author Deborah Levy and Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux. You can read the FT’s lunch with Deborah Levy here. And an interview with Annie Ernaux here.
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Original music by Metaphor Music. Mixing and sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco.
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Life and Art. I'm Lulu Smith in for Lila Ractopoulos. What I'm about to say might sound |
| 0:07.2 | absurd, but books are having a cultural moment right now. I don't mean that we're necessarily |
| 0:12.0 | reading more or that reading has outpaced, say, streaming movies or TV. What I mean is that books are |
| 0:17.8 | fashionable. There are clothes on the runway inspired by novels and authors. |
| 0:21.8 | Fashion houses are sponsoring book podcasts. |
| 0:24.2 | And a recent TikTok interior's trend is called Bookshelf Wealth. |
| 0:27.7 | My colleague Simon Chilvers recently wrote an article about fashion's love affair with literature. |
| 0:32.0 | And he's here with me in the London studio to talk about it. |
| 0:34.7 | Hi, Simon. |
| 0:35.5 | Hi. |
| 0:36.8 | So to start off, can you just sort of tell me about |
| 0:39.3 | how this phenomenon came about, or like how you kind of first noticed the trend? I think one of my |
| 0:45.3 | initial excitements around this topic was an ongoing obsession with Mark Jacobs' Instagram, |
| 0:51.7 | where he has these, what he calls, reading hours, and he will post a |
| 0:56.4 | picture of himself reading a novel or some kind of quite cultural book. And I think originally |
| 1:03.6 | why I found them so amazing was because the books themselves look like really old library books. |
| 1:07.7 | They're like really big, hardbacks. I just thought they were kind of like quite |
| 1:11.4 | fascinating. And he also has longstandingly had a bookstore, which is called Bookmark. |
| 1:18.1 | Is that in London? |
| 1:19.1 | It's in New York. And it's obviously quite a fun name, bookmark, Mark Jacob. |
| 1:23.4 | Yeah. Oh, yeah. |
| 1:27.5 | So you're talking your article about a few bookshops that kind of marry fashion and literature, |
... |
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