The Little Books of Fashion
It’s an unusually warm night out, so I wear a blue floral jacquard miniskirt with an oversized Penn sweatshirt and a pair of black Mary Jane pumps with an Art Deco gold heel. I’m by Rittenhouse Square when a man stops me on the street to compliment the skirt. I do a spin so he can see it’s actually a skort—it looks like a pair of tailored shorts from the back. He looks me up and down and tells me I have great legs and even better calves. My boyfriend observes all of this and tells him it’s from all the walking I do. Before he leaves, the stranger notices the copy of Hail Mary tucked in the crook of my arm and says, with sudden eagerness, “I need to get myself one of those to carry around.” I wait until he’s gone to laugh, because the book isn’t a fashion accessory—I really do carry them around to read on the go as I try to reach my goal of one hundred books this year. I’m at twenty‑five so far, so the method is working.
It makes me think about how reading has become cool—almost a status or cultural symbol thanks to BookTok, Bookstagram, and, well, fashion. Books can create a personal brand or image that signals intelligence, cultural refinement, and personal style. Gigi Hadid was famously photographed with a copy of Albert Camus’s The Stranger during fashion week in 2019. For anyone who has read The Stranger, it’s a bleak, existential novel—not exactly light reading. Online aesthetics like “dark academia” and trends of performative knowledge have made literature another component of fashion. Books, whether treated as props or not, aren’t just a fad. They’re here to stay, and it’s a mutually beneficial relationship: fashion makes books cool, and books become more accessible, popular, influential, and curiosity‑inspiring.
In high fashion, Jonathan Anderson’s Book Tote for Christian Dior has been reimagined with first‑edition book cover designs, with Jennifer Lawrence and Rihanna both spotted carrying Dracula editions. Other accessories have adopted bookish aesthetics too—scarves, small leather goods, and tees displaying book titles or cover art. More recently, for Coach Fall ’26, Book Charms generated buzz. The Coach Book Charms are mini‑books you can actually read, stitched and embossed with real details. They retail for $95 and will be released in March.
This is the full list of titles available in the Coach Book Charms:
1. Friday I’m in Love — Camryn Garrett
2. I’ll Give You the Sun — Jandy Nelson
3. Little Fires Everywhere — Celeste Ng
4. The Book of Answers — Carol Bolt
5. The Try Everything Life — Yan Xiaoyu
6. The Forest of Wool and Steel — Natsu Miyashita
7. Honeybees and Distant Thunder — Riku Onda
8. Welcome to the Hyundai‑Dong Bookshop — Hwang Bo‑Reum
9. Honmono — Sung Haena
10. Untamed — Glennon Doyle
11. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou
12. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen
Celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Dua Lipa are known bibliophiles and run their own book clubs and podcasts. Movie adaptations are being developed left and right: a Pride and Prejudice reboot, The Age of Innocence series with Kristine Froseth (now finished filming), a Jane Eyre remake starring Aimee Lou Wood, and countless others—alongside the cultural juggernaut of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Fashion repeats itself all the time, but the 2019 trend of carrying around books has lasted and only grown more popular. Reading is chic, cool, and here to stay.
Featured Image Courtesy Netgains