How Books Became Fashion’s Latest Status Symbol

**Sheena Butler-Young** (0:08)
Hello, and welcome to The Debrief from The Business of Fashion, where each week we delve into our most popular BOF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young.
Lately, if you've been scrolling social media or walked by a luxury store display, you may have noticed an unlikely accessory showing up everywhere, books. Brands from Coach to Dior to Chanel are embracing literature through products, campaigns, bookstores, library installations and literary salons. And they're doing it at the exact moment that reading rates are actually declining. According to one recent study, 40% fewer Americans read for pleasure in 2025 than they did in 2003
So why is fashion suddenly so fascinated with books? The contradiction is real, but that might be the point. In a world saturated with digital content, the book has started to feel like proof of something. That you slowed down, that you paid attention, that you know things that you didn't learn from your Instagram feed.
Fashion has also noticed consumers are hungry. Fashion has also noticed consumers are hungry for that exact feeling. But is the industry engaging with literature itself or simply the image of it? To help us answer that question, I'm joined by BoF reporters Haley Crawford and Shayeza Walid. Haley, Shayeza, welcome to The Debrief.

**Shayeza Walid** (1:24)
Thanks for having us, Sheena.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (1:25)
Thank you, Sheena.
So I want to start this conversation with what struck me most when I was reading your story, which is that it doesn't feel like a coincidence anymore. We're not talking about one brand hosting a book club or a one-off collab. We're talking about literally bookstores, literary salons, book-themed product launches, publishing partnerships, all of this stuff that's showing up across the industry. So Shayeza, I'll start with you first. What was the moment that you realized that this was something bigger than a handful of one-off initiatives? How did this become a story?

**Shayeza Walid** (1:59)
I think this is one of the most fun stories that I've had the pleasure of doing. It came up in a really collaborative way. I brought it up in a newsroom meeting. I was like, are you guys noticing that it feels like literature has reached this bubbling point across fashion? To your point, we've seen maybe ads with books and people are reading. But it came to a point where we felt like books were being productized by fashion itself, that we were seeing these book back charms from Coach. We were seeing the Dior, Jonathan Anderson toes, I'll say Dracula. I think that became a starting point for everyone to start discussing about, oh, I'm actually seeing this magazine pop up and a brand has showed up there as well. There was this Bottega bag at the Strand bookstore, and then this library in Shanghai by Chanel.
All of us started up coming up with all these examples and ideas, and we felt like this is really a must do. It feels like it's particularly heightened now because literature has always inspired fashion, but this moment felt like this juncture almost that we were reaching, where it was no longer covert in any way.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (3:00)
Haley, what about you? I mean, this is something that we discuss a lot in the newsrooms, but it's not exactly like burnt orange being hot for fall. Look, we kind of had to put our heads together and say, is this a story? Is there a there there? Haley, you obviously focused on marketing a lot for BoF. What was the moment for you when you said, hmm, this is a story?

**Haley Crawford** (3:18)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, books in fashion is not particularly new. Back in 2015, I believe it was Celine Cass, Joan Didion in a campaign, which sparked a lot of buzz in the industry. Olympia Litton was creating book-inspired clutches back in 2009 So it's been bubbling up for a few years. But to Shayeza's point, when we put our heads together and started listing out everything that was happening in the past year alone, we each came up with 10, 20 examples easily.
So when we say three is a trend, 30 or 40 examples is absolutely a trend. So it definitely felt like the right time to jump in and explore it more deeply.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (4:00)
Well, the other interesting thing about this story to me is like we say, it's a trend or it's bigger than a trend and that we've seen patterns, but there's like numbers that don't actually match the pattern.
That book reading is actually declining and maybe, one might think this is a little performative. Like if everyone's walking around with these books in a fashion campaign or there's all these collabs, why isn't readership going up? Talk to me about how you made sense of that contradiction in your reporting. Because I think I've alluded to this already, that's probably partly the point.