AN EXPLORATION OF LITERATURE IN FASHION
APPEARING WELL-READ THROUGH MARKERS OF FASHION
UMA KARUPPIAH EXAMINES FASHION’S ENDURING FIXATION ON LITERATURE. FROM TOTE BAGS TO LUXURY RUNWAYS, BOOKS HAVE UNEQUIVOCALLY BECOME SIGNALS OF TASTE, PRETENSION.
Written by Uma Karuppiah
Edited by Gabriel Mealor-Pritchard
Image courtesy of Chopova Lowena
The enmeshing of fashion and literature is a predictable and longstanding move within the industry. It bears long, untraceable roots, but finds lucid echoes in the etching of sincere words from novels into romantic relics. Whether through the inscription of quotes or the literal transposing of a book onto the surface of a garment, literary fashion carries an outsized potency. The precise channels from which this potency is drawn are difficult to isolate, but it hovers somewhere between a reverence for the archive and a renewed strain of logo-mania, teetering between pretension and organic interest.
The literary tote bag remains the most persuasive case study of fashion in the name of appearing ‘well-read’. Its application in ‘swag bags’ at ‘fashionable’ parties throughout the ’90s still bears cultural weight; visually curious totes insinuate promising contents, whether high-brow literature or trinketry of equal intrigue curated by their owner. The Daunt Books tote bag, released in 2006, has since spread like wildfire. This may be attributed to its sturdier, more sumptuous appearance, a marked contrast to the flimsier structure of the average tote. It has been photographed on the shoulders of celebrities of a particular strain—Helena Bonham Carter, Keira Knightley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Emily Ratajkowski—figures who occupy fascinating positions within the interloping terrain of fashion and literature.
Images courtesy of MEGA, Alamy Stock Photos & GC Photos
Ratajkowski and Bonham Carter in particular serve as foils. Ratajkowski, hoisting the bag post–My Body, folds it neatly into her ongoing project of literary rebranding. Bonham Carter, meanwhile, appears as something closer to the Daunt tote’s blueprint-wearer: a nepo-baby of the Bonham auctioneer family, her bag sandwiched between layered beneath layers of effortless, coquettish textures. Markers like the tote are invaluable to stylists; they signal not only aesthetic sensibility, but also where the wearer spends their time.
The Daunt bag is relatively innocuous compared to other literary totes. Penguin Classics totes, for instance, are frequently spotted in the wild, depicting a vast selection of covers-now replicated with near accuracy by fast-fashion outlets. Sam Wolfson’s scathing take on the Penguin tote holds some water. He describes their owners as those who ‘schlep around both their shopping and literary pretension in one of these classic cover totes’, lamenting that ‘surely the thing about being well-read is that its joys come serendipitously’. While the direct pasting of a cover with no new twist arguably undermines this sense of serendipity, the critique begins to fray when luxury fashion enters the picture.
Dior’s first collection under Jonathan Anderson leans into this same appeal. Previewed in 2025 and released this January, the bags are marketed as featuring ‘first-edition covers from the 19th and 20th centuries’ embroidered onto their surfaces—an almost identical selling point to Penguin’s. Once again, the literary siphons its strength from the insinuation of archival access. At surface level, this may seem tenuous, but it aligns with a broader “Emerald Fennell-ing” of literature: the processing of canonical texts into sultry symbols of dark academia. Her forthcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation exemplifies this re-commercialisation of classics and the harnessing of their cultural capital.
When Heaven by Marc Jacobs launched its first drop, ‘a whole generation of fashion fans ascended to a higher plane’. This ascendancy relied on a familiar parlour trick: drawing on the spirit of subcultures and re-contextualising them into something newly desirable. The brand’s engagement with Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides operated less as an adaptation than as a signal—a visual shorthand for shared cultural literacy. The imagery, softened by Coppola’s warm-toned aesthetic, was received sensationally, fostering a sense of insider recognition among those already submerged in the novel and film. Heaven excels at locating these cultural pulsepoints and extracting exclusivity from them.
Image courtesy of Marc Jacobs
This sensibility is physicalised in Heaven’s retail spaces. In Soho, a slender shelf by the shop window hosts a curated selection of books and ephemera supplied by Climax Books, a self-described distributor of hard-to-find periodicals, erotica, VHS tapes, and countercultural texts. Climax’s carefully honed identity has proven magnetic to fashion brands—Chopova Lowena’s lingerie set emblazoned with ‘Climax’ script is a recent example—reviving logo-mania through literary and archival symbols (see image at top of page).
Script lifted directly from books offers an even more exclusive funnel. The rhetoric of ‘if you know, you know’ reaches new extremes when lines from specific texts are abstracted onto cloth. I remember receiving a postcard quoting Wuthering Heights in my youth— ‘whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same’—and feeling its quiet power. I’m less certain I’d want it on a tote bag. This is the crux of it: the serendipity you forfeit when intimacy becomes inscription.
Valentino’s engagement with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is a more compelling intervention. A line of aching poignancy—‘WE ARE SO OLD, WE HAVE BECOME YOUNG AGAIN’—is fragmented across a blazer, split at the lapels. One side reads ‘WE ARE WE HAVE YOUNG’, the other ‘SO OLD, BECOME AGAIN’. This disintegration feels genuinely inventive, less like reanimation and more like interrogation, akin to how the Dior– Anderson totes operate at their best.
Image courtesy of Valentino
I end with the Fitzcarraldo tote bags, which function almost as a response to all of the above. Blazoned with the title of Dan Fox’s essay Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, and the first paragraph printed on the reverse, the bag openly stakes its claim. It protects the cultural currency of wearing one’s literary interests by owning the charge of pretension outright. In doing so, it proposes pretentiousness not as a sinister force, but as a catalyst for cultural and intellectual innovation. As a self-professed tote-bag owner, wit clothing littered with markers of what I read, where I buy books, what I watch, maybe even what I eat, I truly have no leg to stand on in discerning what these markers of being well-read could do to the detriment of popular culture, but it is a question I feel one must ask before each purchase, particularly with such lucrative projects as T-shirts, totes and other detritus with printable surfaces.
Image courtesy of Dior & Jonathan Anderson