Today's Fashion and Reading (22/3/2026)

22 Mar, 2026

We are living in a period of political anti-intellectualism. But in pop culture, clever is the new cool

we are being dumbed down for profit by an addictive social media, which turns us all into remote-working battery chickens of the attention farms of Silicon Valley.

And so reading is more visible than it has been in years. You have already seen the books. The blue-and-white covers of Fitzcarraldo Editions peeking out of tote bags. Dog-eared copies of Wuthering Heights on the train, sudden ubiquity lending it the air of a seasonal accessory.

but it would be naive to ignore that books have always been aesthetic objects. Home libraries were status symbols long before Instagram; the orange spine of Penguin classics is as recognisable as any designer monogram. The book cover as design object is nothing new: Francis Cugat’s 1925 illustration for the first edition of The Great Gatsby, spectral eyes over blazing cityscape, a fever dream of hedonism and melancholy, is a design classic.