There’s a particular kind of beauty bookish people have, the quiet, conspiratorial allure of someone who lives partly in the world and partly in their own head. For a long time, this wasn’t considered cool; at best it was quaint, at worst it was code for “introverted.” But something has shifted. Reading – and everything orbiting it – has become a new form of cultural capital. Hot people, unmistakably, read.
Just look at the cultural signals. Dua Lipa’s book club has become a full-blown brand ecosystem, a glossy meeting point between literary taste and pop-star celebrity. Dakota Johnson has turned the act of holding a novel into its own language: the girl carrying Just Kids in an airport terminal, or the one nonchalantly leafing through Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest between takes. These are not accidents. These are aesthetic choices.
You see it everywhere: soft-focus snapshots of open novels next to matcha, sly stacks of theory texts on bedside tables, carefully styled shelves that look like an interior designer whispered “Semiotext(e), but make it chic.” And while we all pretend we’re posting for the love of literature, the truth is more layered, books have quietly become a new kind of social currency.
It makes sense. In a culture saturated with images, taste has become the real status symbol. Not wealth, not beauty, not even originality – but taste. And nothing signals taste more elegantly than the right book. Not necessarily the most difficult or impressive book, but the one that places you in a certain canon of people who are curious, self-aware, lightly intellectual, and just the right amount of pretentious. The book as accessory isn’t new, but the book as aesthetic identity, that’s distinctly now.
This is the world that gave rise to the “lit-girl,” the “bookish boyfriend,” the endless TikTok micro-genres of reading personalities, and the broader resurgence of what you could call cultural chic. We’ve moved past minimalism and wellness into something more cerebral. The new luxury is intellectual glamour, not dusty or academic, but clean, styled, lightly mysterious. Dua Lipa curating reading lists in a swimsuit. Dakota Johnson doing press with a Joan Didion paperback tucked inside her tote. Chic, but thinking.
Reading has become a style. So has writing. Which is why Substack – improbably – has become one of the defining platforms of self-branding. It’s no longer just for journalists or aspiring authors; it’s a place to cultivate a voice, a persona, a worldview. Your reading becomes a narrative. Your newsletter becomes your taste in long form. You’re not just someone who reads – you’re someone with something to say about what you read.
And let’s be honest: a newsletter is the chicest way to announce “I’m interesting” without ever saying it directly. It’s intimate. It’s slow. It resists the algorithmic chaos we’re used to. It whispers rather than shouts. It is the digital equivalent of reading a book in public, a quiet, alluring status symbol.
Of course, there’s a tension. When reading becomes aestheticised, there’s always the risk of performance overtaking substance. The untouched hardbacks on the coffee table. The beautifully designed newsletter that says a lot but feels hollow. The desire to appear literate rather than living a genuinely literate life. But even this tension tells us something about what people value now: depth, curiosity, interiority, and the fantasy of being a person with a mind.
And perhaps that’s why the whole thing feels unexpectedly refreshing. In an era where everything is content, books still promise a kind of slow, thoughtful luxury. They demand time. They require attention. They mark you as someone willing to step out of the noise for a moment of interiority. In that sense, they’re irresistible.
The literary aesthetic is having a moment because people are craving worlds that feel bigger, richer, more considered. Whether they’re actually reading or simply staging a perfect shot with a first edition matters less than purists would like. What matters is that books are back in the cultural conversation as extensions of how people want to be seen.
Hot people read. Or at the very least, hot people want to be seen reading. And maybe, in a culture starved for meaning, that’s a start.
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