Image credits: Getty Images

In Emma Cline’s unsettling, everybody-has-it-in-their-beach-bag ‘vacay bummer’, book, The Guest, fashion is a major tell. It’s one way the book’s cipher of a main character Alex, a sex worker cast adrift in a ritzy unnamed beach town surviving on her wonky moral compass and pretty, white privilege, understands the game. How to pass among women in “white cropped pants, expensive sandals, pearl earrings.” She has expensive dresses too, given to her by the client who up until recently was keeping her in a manner to which she had accustomed. 

Jane Austen meanwhile was the ultimate chronicler of fashion, not only as it pertained to one’s station but also giving us a time capsule of the modes of dress, and thinking, of her time.

As Virginia Woolf, another total clothes horse—albeit one conflicted about her love of fashion— once noted, “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” 

Ottessa Moshfegh walks for Maryam Nassir Zadeh. Image credit: courtesy of the brand

It’s a quote that’s been used by Kim Jones, artistic director of Fendi and an enthusiastic collector of first edition books, as a source of inspiration along with Woolf’s gender twisting novel Orlando. Zadie Smith—who was just profiled in British Vogue (because she has a new book coming out!) wearing incredible looks from Alaia and Margiela Tabi boots (!) has also grappled with it before.

“[Woolf] was even more conflicted about clothes than I am, but she better understood that what a woman does with her wardrobe is not very different from what a novelist does with her characters: clothing the self as a way of viewing the world and of being viewed,” she wrote in a 2019 essay on the differences between how women dress in London and New York.

The late Joan Didion was an ultimate style icon. Pictured here in 1987. Image credit: Getty Images

Smith, who published her first book, White Teeth, when she was 24, has been front row at Prada, her style signatures include a turban and Miu Miu shoes. She says in the profile in British Vogue that Rachel Comey is her favourite designer and she loves/hates buying clothes.

“I waste a lot of money on fashion. I have a very clear idea of my body and what looks good to me,” she tells profiler  Zing Tsjen. “I don’t want to look at how much it costs. I have an entirely guilt-laden relationship with it.”

Still, like in most things Zadie Smith might be the North Star, but the fashion and the literary world have long been bedfellows. Even if sometimes uneasy ones. There are the literary figures who have become style icons—Donna Tart and her natty suits, Joan Didion’s now iconic packing list and Celine campaign, Fran Lebowitz’s ‘uniform’ of tailored suits from Savile Row and cuffed Levi’s jeans. 

Fran Lebowitz in 2022. Image credit: Getty Images

Fashion has turned to books on the runway plenty of times too. Most recently Pierpaulo Piccioli took inspiration from Hanya Yanagihara’s brutal Little Life. But Ian Griffiths, creative director at Max Mara, used Françoise Sagan’s slim and scandalous 1954 French novel Bonjour Tristesse as the starting point for his spring/summer 2022 collection and of course Kim Jones loves Virginia Woolf. Ottessa Moshfegh, another author to write a book everybody once had in their bag, has walked the runway for cool girl New York brand Maryam Nassir Zadeh and earlier this year wrote a series of 'diary entries' that were read out at Proenza Schouler's 20th anniversary New York Fashion Week show. 

Kaia Gerber with a book at fashion week. Image credit: Getty Images

Meanwhile Chanel has the dream book club in its Rendez Vous-Litteraires concept, which highlights the work of women. Then there’s the ‘hot girl books,’ beloved by the likes of Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner (and also everyone, it is a mindset after-all). 

Fashion and literature fits the way clothes have infiltrated all corners of culture. Each benefits the other—be it the gloss of fashion, the elevation of fashion to highbrow status or the way it offers a way to examine how someone is presenting themselves to the world.

Fashion is, after-all, an ultimate tell. 

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