They say reading is fundamental! In the past few years books have increasingly played a starring role in the fashion discourse as designers seek inspiration in literature, sometimes sharing the books they’re reading with guests as invitations, or leaving them on their seats as gifts.
In London, Erdem Moralioglu looked to The Well of Loneliness, a lesbian novel published in 1928 and swiftly banned in England for the next two decades, and to its author, Radclyffe Hall, “who was born Marguerite and went by John later in life,” as the designer explained to Sarah Mower at his show. His clothes were a reflection of impeccable masculine tailoring of the 1920s, and Moralioglu combined them with his signature effervescent high femme dresses.
At JW Anderson, meanwhile, Jonathan Anderson cited Clive Bell, a British art critic who formed part of the Bloomsbury Group, an informal coterie of writers and artists (and interestingly, an economist) who shared the value that one’s main purpose in life was love, creativity, beauty, and “the pursuit of knowledge.” Anderson printed an excerpt from an essay on art and design by Bell across dresses and shredded knits. He didn’t go into detail about the inspiration but rather told Mower that it was a reflection of his thoughts on the fashion industry. “It’s more like this idea of starting from a blank page. Where is the next decade going, and how do we work with it?” Previously, Anderson cited Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” at the Loewe spring 2025 menswear show, and shared an excerpt from a Danielle Steele novel, The Affair, with guests ahead of the Loewe fall 2021 show.
But few have been as outwardly ambitious with their use of literature as a part of a runway show’s messaging as Daniel Delcore, who showed his new collection in Milan today. His muse this season was a very well-read scientist, who never leaves home without a book written by a female author, whether she’s going to work or to a party. Delcore’s reading list included—in the order seen at the show—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and finally Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. (Sontag is proving to be a real designer favorite!)
It’s impossible to think that Delcore chose all these titles at random, as they all have to do with, well, the actual human condition in the year 2024—from Silent Spring, which documented the environmental harm caused by the use of pesticides and the way the American public was lied to about it, to Parable of the Sower, which is set in a post-apocalyptic America in which society has collapsed thanks to climate change and economic equality. Add a few books and essays on the theory of aesthetics, performance, and the act of looking and being looked at, and, well, this is a full-on liberal arts education on the runway. It remains to be seen whether this trend will continue in Paris, but at least for now, we have plenty of reading material to keep ourselves occupied.