From Chanel to Miu Miu, luxury brands are making books the ultimate status symbol
From luxury campaigns to new investors into the rare book markets, books have never been a hotter commodity – or decider of taste.
Karl Lagerfeld, the legendary Chanel creative director and noted bibliophile, ended up with a personal library containing some 300,000 books. He also rather famously stacked them horizontally on his shelves.
It turns out that Lagerfeld was a very good client of Peter Harrington Rare Books. The London bookshop started as a stall at the Chelsea markets in 1969 but now is, well, a byword for first editions, signed and extremely special releases. It now has locations in Chelsea and Mayfair in London and has just opened its first store in New York City.
The bookstore’s current owner, Pom Harrington, son of its founder Peter Harrington, says they didn’t know Karl Lagerfeld was a client until after his death in 2019. Only that an awfully good client would buy 15 or 20 books every week and have his assistant send them on. Gradually they learnt the mystery client’s taste and started to choose books they thought he would like. “Early 20th century poetry, French, Anglo French, privately pressed [books], there was a certain theme to it,” says Harrington of Lagerfeld’s proclivities. Lagerfeld also opened his own bookshop and library, 7L in Paris, which was later purchased by Chanel.
Kim Jones, the former artistic director of Fendi and Dior Men, also famously has a superb rare book collection. He, too, shops at Peter Harrington Rare Books, though his tastes lend more to the Bloomsbury Group and books published by two of the group’s most prominent members, Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard’s, imprint, the Hogarth Press. Some of the books Jones displays in his personal library are in the custom “clam boxes” that Peter Harrington Rare Books makes for its rarest of finds.
Jones fits with how Harrington views the best collectors. As with anything really, it’s about buying what you love. “Rare books are not a financial instrument in that sense. And anyone who treats it that way either has to be extremely knowledgeable and skilled, or frankly, a bit ignorant … but I also think it’s disingenuous for me to say, ‘Oh, spend a hundred thousand dollars for the love’. I mean, of course it’s an investment. I do accept that,” he says.
“So there are some rules we say you should apply. And mainly it goes back to that passion investment. You are buying it because you love it. And if you find something, it could be a first edition of Ulysses because you think it’s the greatest novel, or that special copy of Pride and Prejudice, or if you’re interested in travel or Captain Cook, whatever it may be. If you find it personally really interesting and you do your research … the people that do best tend to be people that really buy something they know and understand and love and buy the best copy you can get.”
Later this month Harrington will attend the Melbourne Rare Book Fair, bringing along such treasures as a copy of Ulysses signed by James Joyce and once owned by the Jameson whisky family, plus a specially bound copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If.
It turns out that a lot of people, in this complicated (and screen-time heavy) era are turning to books. Not only has Harrington seen more book collectors come onto the market – the pandemic, was a boon for purveyors of rare books – but they’re younger, too.
“I think certainly there’s a bigger appreciation for the printed book than there was,” says Harrington, pointing to the internet and Kindles for making us appreciate books more, and also publishers returning to both reverence for books and 18th-century practices, such as limited print-runs and special bindings.
According to research from book-publishing data provider Circana Bookscan, in 2024 sales of books increased – nominally, but still – for the first time in three years. Not to mention, it seems that every celebrity, from Natalie Portman to model Kaia Gerber has a book club. Luxury brands are taking notice. Literature has long been laced throughout Chanel’s history – Coco Chanel herself once declared “books have been my best friends”. And now Lagerfeld’s Paris bookshop and Chanel’s original haute couture salon regularly play host to the maison’s Les Rendez-vous littéraires rue Cambon series, helmed by house ambassador Charlotte Casiraghi (who also introduces the spinoff Les Rencontres podcast). The book club has honoured the work of female writers such as Siri Hustvedt, Leïla Slimani, Colette and Rachel Cusk, often with readings and interviews with the authors themselves, as well as Chanel ambassadors such as Keira Knightley.
This year Miu Miu introduced its Literary Club to Milan Design Week and Prada commissioned Ottessa Moshfegh, the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, to write Ten Protagonists, a series of short stories illustrated by actor Carey Mulligan wearing looks from Prada’s latest collections. The books were given to guests at Prada events around the globe. Virginia Woolf has been on the moodboard for Kim Jones at Fendi as well as Givenchy and Burberry. Meanwhile a recent campaign for Saint Laurent starred Chloë Sevigny, Charlotte Gainsbourg and the works of Marcel Proust. Yves Saint Laurent was an ardent fan of Proust, once writing, “Like Proust, I’m fascinated most of all by my perceptions of a world in awesome transition. And my heart has always been divided between the vestals of constancy and the avatars of change.”
Certainly it’s an apt descriptor of the whims of fashion and evolution of tastes. Taste is something interior decorator Tamsin Johnson can attest to when it comes to displaying one’s treasured tomes. “Books hold enormous emotional and sensual value at the same time. There is the scent of them, the page quality, the mass, the stock and the colours, and as a library, they create an extension of us,” she says.
When styling bookshelves in her own home and those of clients, Johnson says she connects with collections that feel true to the owner and the reader.
“I am drawn to complex collections that feel as though they are in a secondhand bookshop or some academic study, and also more strictly coded presentations in a more zen or clinical setting,” she says.
“I love books in masses on tables and sideboards and sometimes ‘micro-libraries’ tucked in unexpected places or as a trim high up. I love the way small sculptures, objet, precious things and artworks break or disrupt chains of books, or the occasional book faced out.”
Here Johnson points to Karl Lagerfeld’s signature displays. “A great example was that of Karl Lagerfeld’s Paris library where he stacked blocks of books rather than a conventional spine-up line,” she says.
Putting a lot of thought into acquiring and displaying books is something Lucy Pearson, a library stylist and bibliotherapist (a person who “prescribes” books to someone according to their mood, preferences and taste) is seeing more. Pearson curates books for luxury hotels and holiday homes and says it is less about how a book looks, rather what it says about a space. And also, how do these books make someone feel?
“I start by asking a lot of questions: about mood, and meaning. For hotels, that means thinking deeply about the location, the kind of escape the guest is seeking, and how the library can enhance that,” she says.
Pearson has noticed a shift in the content of personal libraries, too. “People are moving away from shelves filled with unread hardbacks and towards more intentional collections,” she says. “Libraries are starting to signal a life curated by values – curiosity, calm, cultural depth – rather than status.”
Harrington says there is one constant of literary investors: people often want to buy the books that shaped their formative years. “The one trend that’s been clearly prevalent in my 30 years of dealing rare books is when you get to forties and you’ve got a bit of money, what do you buy? If you’re interested in books, you’ll buy the books that influenced you or you loved when you started reading or studying.” Yves Saint Laurent and his lifelong love of Proust could certainly attest to this.
This story is from the July issue of WISH.
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