Read the Room: Valentino, Alix Earle & Why Reading Still Matters

This fashion month, the most revealing thing a woman could carry was a book.

First came Alix Earle, who told Interview she’s never read one. “I’ve never read a book,” she said, before adding, “Like, maybe Dr. Seuss?” The internet took it about as well as you’d expect, and, soon enough, the comment section on every Instagram post that reported this news was full of people labelling her “sad” and “embarrassing”. But, beneath the jokes and indignation sat a more uncomfortable question: when did having no interest in books become a charming personality quirk? Just like the iced coffee debate was never about the actual coffee, this one isn’t about the book.

Then came Valentino. At Alessandro Michele’s Spring/Summer 2027 show, held in Paris’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, guests were asked to arrive with a book. Cynthia Erivo, for example, brought James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Suddenly, and suddenly the front row had something to discuss beyond who was wearing what.

Read together, the two moments offered a remarkably neat portrait of our relationship with literature: something we can apparently dispense with entirely, and something we still reach for when we want to express who we are. And I’m firmly with Valentino. What unsettles me about Alix’s admission is the ease with which a life without literature is presented to an impressionable audience as something amusing, even endearing.

The world is in a dark enough place without making incuriosity aspirational. Books give us the space to hear people whose voices are routinely drowned out, to understand lives far removed from our own, and to question the comfortable assumptions we’ve inherited. They ask us to sit with someone else’s experience for longer than it takes to swipe past it. When so much public conversation trades in caricature and division, choosing to read feels like a small but necessary act of responsibility.

So this is your invitation to visit a local bookshop this week. Bonus points for supporting a homegrown business before reflexively opening Amazon. Buy a book by a Black author, a female author, someone whose experience of the world is different from yours. Borrow one from a friend and ask why they loved it. You don’t need an impressive reading list or a beautifully curated bookshelf. Just a little curiosity and the willingness to give someone else’s story your attention.