Valentino Is Judging You by Your Bookshelf

Somewhere along the way, books became cool again. Not that reading ever really went out of style, but lately it feels like owning, carrying and, most importantly, being seen with the right book has taken on a whole new meaning. Books are appearing in photo dumps, sticking out of bags and lying suspiciously well-positioned next to coffee cups. Being well-read is attractive again, and apparently fashion got the memo.

At Valentino’s SS27 show in Paris, Alessandro Michele invited guests into his Antibiblioteca, a concept dedicated not to the books we have read, but to all the ones we haven’t. Guests were asked to bring a book of their own, which would later be donated to a local library. Cynthia Erivo, Clairo, Alexander Skarsgård, Anna Wintour and Joe Alwyn were among those who arrived with their choices in hand.

And suddenly the question wasn’t only what everyone was wearing, but what everyone was reading.

There is something strangely intimate about knowing which book someone chooses to carry around. Clothes already tell us plenty about how we want to be perceived, but a book goes a little further. It tells people what we think about, what we know, or perhaps simply what we would like them to believe we think about and know.

Because let’s be fair: choosing a book for Valentino Fashion Week is probably not quite the same as choosing one for a week at the beach. If thousands of people are going to see it, the choice inevitably becomes part of the outfit. A book can say I’m interesting, I’m intellectual, I have references. And suddenly carrying a slightly worn classic around Paris doesn’t feel that different from carrying the right bag.

This is hardly limited to fashion week. Reading has slowly found its way into the aesthetics of the internet. There are celebrity book clubs, Substack reading lists and entire TikTok accounts devoted to what beautiful people are supposedly reading. Joan Didion sits on bedside tables, Sally Rooney disappears into tote bags and a girl reading alone in a café has somehow become its own genre of aspirational content.

Maybe we really are reading more. But maybe we have also realised that being a reader is a particularly attractive identity to have.

Of course, performative reading existed long before Instagram. People have always filled shelves with books they never finished and bought intimidating classics with very optimistic intentions. The difference is that our books now have an audience. Just like our clothes, holidays, restaurants and music taste, what used to be relatively private can now become another tiny piece of evidence in the ongoing presentation of who we are.

That’s what makes Michele’s Antibiblioteca particularly interesting. Instead of pretending we have read everything sitting on our shelves, it is dedicated to the unread books: the novel we bought three years ago, the classic we keep meaning to start, the book that has somehow moved apartments with us twice without ever being opened.

Maybe those books aren’t meaningless just because we haven’t read them. They represent curiosity, intention and, perhaps most importantly, a future version of ourselves. We buy them because one day we might finally become the person who reads Proust before bed instead of spending forty minutes on TikTok.

And that feels very familiar. We do the same thing with clothes, hobbies, furniture and memberships. Sometimes we don’t only want the thing itself; we want the person we imagine ourselves becoming once we have it.

Maybe the unread book on your bedside table is simply another version of that desire.

And if carrying a book because it looks good eventually makes you open it on the metro ride home, maybe being a little performative isn’t the worst place to start.

by Noémi Zak