When Did Reading Get So Sexy?

Intellectual Aestheticism from Poets and Posers at the Intersection of Fashion

Do you know what the innest, trendiest fashion item is right now sweet Substackers? It’s a copy of Madame Bovary tucked under your arm, stacked in your hands or placed casually on your Parisian coffee table. Double points for leather-bound or hard-back, triple points if you have an old journal with literary and philosophical musings too.

Wearing a blazer and listening to The Smiths while holding a copy of In Search of Lost Time has become more than just a fashion statement; it’s the way of asserting intellectual authority and claiming an elite heritage alongside Wilde or Baudelaire and casually signalling to the rest of us their more contemplative, cultivated lifestyle, all while turning intellectualism itself into a form of erotic desire.

Reading is Sexy and I’m a Sapiosexual.

There’s an idea that our engagement with literature makes a connection that is as intellectual as it is sensual and emotional. Rather than reading exclusively for meaning, Barthes insists that reading, like desire, operates within a framework of fulfilment and frustration.

Barthes talks about a seductive kind of ‘dance' with the text which I sum up as so: the text performs its coy strip tease, offering us occasional rewards of slips of meanings and insights, pleasurable moments of clarity in our pursuit. But it also gestures to something unsaid- like a lover, the text remains elusive, and since you and I know there’s always something more to uncover, to understand, to notice, this perpetually deferred fulfilment keeps us coming back.

In this ambivalence pleasure is really brought to fruition. In contrast to plaisir (meaning pleasure; conventional, contained pleasure from simple texts) jouissance (meaning bliss/orgasm; unsettling, disruptive pleasure from fragmented or ambiguous texts), Barthes argues, is found in the most pleasurable texts which refuse singular meaning. Questions and questions and questions for that elusive lover; and the reader becomes a lover who is never really satisfied, returning again and again to the text. Consider, for instance, the legacy and our continued interest in ‘unfinished’ literature; Sappho’s fragments, fragmentation as a literary method in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, To The Lighthouse, etc. Romantics writing poems as fragments. In 1800 when Friedrich Schlegel asked, “Who would want to reject so beautifully printed a book with the vulgar remark that it doesn’t make any sense?" again, he was describing our fascination with language and trivial truths which can not ever be expressed in their entirety. John Ashbery, Michael Palmer, Allen Ginsberg, *sniffle* and so on and so forth.

Those who are cultivated and who cultivate themselves must always want to learn more from it.

This ongoing experience therefore becomes something erotic, where desire is sustained by its incompleteness, or, the deferral of meaning. In short, we love the chase.

And what Barthes is saying is not dissimilar from Diotima’s message in Plato’s Symposium. Diotima (through Socrates) (through Plato) describes love as a ladder, which takes the soul higher, up towards the elevated forms of beauty and knowledge. The first few steps talk about love for bodies, physical beauty etc, but the aim of the ladder is to motivate us philosophically away from physical attractions and towards contemplation or wisdom about Beauty itself.

The reader’s journey into the multifaceted text and her (ha!) pursuit of desire is very much like Diotima’s Ladder of Love, because of our initial attraction to the body of the text (so, beautiful language and form etc that makes us go, wow great prose, so poetic,) and our open ended efforts of contemplation that come from looking at its deeper meanings. I made you a diagram:

The Power of A Russian Accessory

Out of all the traditionally difficult, and philosophical writers in the Western canon, a certain circle of European writers triumph in social media circles where intellectual depth and sophistication are increasingly craved. The Russians: Dostoevsky (his role in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice 2024 really cracked me up), Tolstoy, Nabokov; and the French: Proust, Balzac. First, why them?

The aestheticisation of Russian and French literature in particular seems to resonate with the already established cultivated aesthetics of a bourgeois style of living (so to speak), and that essence captured in high fashion. Those thick books of Crime and Punishment or Anna Karenina just have so much that fashion campaigns (or really anyone) can leverage; make your theme about free will, the soul’s suffering, etc etc. They appeal to a contemplative seriousness within the creative world, and also a legacy of being against the grain; Russian writers forming a countercultural ethos has been so easy to commodify into fashion as a sign that certain fashion houses are able to create an aesthetic AND seriously intellectual rebellion. If individualism is a key tenet in fashion, then literature can become a symbol not only for intelligence but of individualism for fashion branding and campaigns.

Likewise, French writers are often associated with sensuality and aesthetic experience. Again take any theme such as memory, time, the forbidden fruit. Albeit I’ve condensed this, these are themes I would not be surprised to see at the Met Gala. The French tradition of emphasising visual beauty, sex, luxury- these align perfectly with the fashion world. When you think about Baudelaire’s flâneur, this detached, lone, contemplative figure in the city, effortlessly chic and poetic, can you also see the high fashion models, straight faced and chic?

All of this works within Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of ‘cultural capital’, collecting and promoting ‘legitimate’ culture such as knowledge of classical literature, travel, or other fine arts- crucially forms of education and style that show off social status. Oh you spent your summer at a marketing internship? I went to Rome and spent my evenings watching La Traviata, drinking Masseto, visited Ayahuasca retreats and really focused on introspection in my 6AM Kundalini Yoga sessions. Something like that.

So reading is now more than just a love for knowledge or the text, but a deliberate assertion of its cultural sophistication. Where mass consumerism and fast fashion creates a shallowness in fashion, high-brow designers and influencers can use literature as a filler, selling a lifestyle (not just clothes!) of timeless intellectual and cultural sophistication.

Books As Props and The Fashionable Aesthetic of Intellectual Desire

Library-Core. Thin specs, vintage cardigans and blazers, black tights, leather-bound journals, hardbound classics, black coffee or tea in porcelain cups, oxford brogues or Mary Janes, vanilla and pepper perfumes, and lilac Vogues. Yearning for nostalgia, romance, intellectual visibility in the modern material world. Another subcultural aesthetic! Rather than its undeniable presence on social media (25% increase for people searching #librariancore over 6 months on Pintrest last year!)¹, however, I want to draw your attention towards big fashion houses like Miu Miu (the little sister of Prada for the uncultured…) and how they play with library-core, incorporating the legacy of European writers into the brand’s (billion$ value) looks. Some examples:

Emma Chamberlain head to toe in Miu Miu

Miu Miu A/W 23

Chanel, A/W 2019

Fashion houses like Miu Miu, trickling down into high-street brands like Zara can embrace intellectual chic/library-core to appeal to our desire for an intellectual symbol of sensual allure- a bygone era that plays with our nostalgia. If you are interested enough to look at more of Miu Miu’s recent campaigns, you will see young female models in almost schoolgirl like clothing- their famousss pleated skirts, loafers, glasses really evoke a kind of modern day (age appropriate) Lolita, blending together erotic designs with bookish charm. The result is created in this visual narrative of knowledge and beauty that is sexy and desired.

Books and glasses become fashion accessories or props, and when women and men claim this particular style, they can create an identity which asserts themselves as both the philosopher or poet and the seductress, bring together mind and body. The fashionable fascination with Russian and French literature show us how intellectual desire remains as a form of social power and cultural capital. Reading, in, but not limited to, the context of style, is forever seductive and sexy.

1. See Style Analytics on Substack for more!