Put down your negroni, hang up your Prada handbag and pick up a paperback. Next time someone whips out their phone to take your picture, grab your reading specs, not your lipstick. Smart is the new hot.
Pop stars are launching book clubs – the 1970s had Studio 54, this decade has Dua Lipa’s online literary salon Service95 – or joining Substack, where Charli xcx recently published a 1,800-word essay interrogating why it is that as a pop star “you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid”. The supermodel Kaia Gerber (who is fashion royalty – her mum is Cindy Crawford) passes the time backstage at fashion week reading Didion, Duras and Camus, not Vogue.
Three years ago, we dressed in pink to go to the cinema to watch Barbie; in 2026, the mind-bendingly structured, early-Victorian masterpiece Wuthering Heights is the talk of Hollywood, and Netflix is betting big on Emma Corrin as Elizabeth Bennet in Dolly Alderton’s forthcoming adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Intellect and glamour – which have always sat at separate tables in the high-school canteen of pop culture (you can’t sit with the cool kids if you are a teacher’s pet, everyone knows that) – are flirting hard.
“This is real,” says trend forecaster Lucie Greene. “There is a backlash against visually focused lifestyle content, which has become so co-opted by brands. Gen Z want more. They want knowledge. They want to go deep down the rabbit hole, on podcasts and on Reddit as well as on TikTok and YouTube.” Meet you behind the bike sheds to discuss Walter Benjamin over a cigarette, babe.
“Reading is so sexy,” Gerber said in 2024 when she launched her book club, Library Science. (First pick: Martyr!, the poet Kaveh Akbar’s anarchic debut novel about grief, martyrdom and addiction – hardly an easy read.) She’s right, obviously, but this is bigger than books. It is thinking, as well as reading, that is cool again. The novel under the arm is just the lapel pin of the brainiac. When the brilliant British designer Louise Trotter was appointed to the Italian luxury label Bottega Veneta last year, top of her in-tray was to cast models for a new advertising campaign. The beauties she chose? Zadie Smith and the octogenarian sculptor and poet Barbara Chase-Riboud.
If we were dumbing this down, I could say that brains are the new boobs. But dumbing down is so over, so let’s dig a little deeper into how we got to a place where Dua Lipa posts selfies on Instagram reclining in a fancy hotel room in full glam and a cocktail dress, winking to the camera over her copy of Just Kids by Patti Smith, and actor Jacob Elordi is papped in an airport bookshop flicking through playwright Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie with a second paperback conspicuously stuffed in a pocket.
It all started with a Kardashian. Of course it did – say what you like about that family, their cultural instincts are rarely wrong. In 2018, Kim Kardashian announced that she was embarking on the long, unglamorous process of qualifying for the California bar. For two decades the Kardashians have anticipated and shaped what aspiration looks like. Kardashian’s pivot towards legal study was an early experiment in whether intellectual seriousness could be folded into celebrity without destroying its commercial appeal.
A few years later, reading itself began to creep into the frame. In the summer of 2021, the first season of The White Lotus aired. Its young, beautiful characters were rarely without books by the pool. Sydney Sweeney’s Olivia read Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, while Brittany O’Grady’s Paula was shown with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The books functioned as character shorthand, a way of signalling that these generation Z kids had hinterlands, but was also a visual assertion that thought could be televisual. Around the same time, paparazzi shots of models and actors reading (Kendall Jenner photographed with a paperback on a yacht in 2019; Emily Ratajkowski reading Joan Didion in bed in 2020) became minor viral events, with the text in their hands scrutinised as closely as their clothes.
Ratajkowski’s visibility in this space presented a particular challenge to the status quo, because she is not just pretty, she is hot. And here she was, publishing essays, giving interviews about feminism and power, and, in 2021, releasing My Body, a bestselling collection that insisted that a woman could be a serious writer without backing down on the day job of being a sex symbol. There were echoes of this mind-bend in 2025 when the avant-garde pop star FKA twigs, once notorious for her athletic pole‑dancing skills, delivered a keynote address at the British Library, explicitly calling out what she described as the “dumbing down” of public life. “Where are the thinkers?” she asked, demanding intellect as a civic right, a utility, a public service.
his is a very strange moment for smart to get hot. We are living through a period of pronounced anti‑intellectualism. Expertise is dismissed as elitism, procedure as dull, facts as irrelevant. Trump’s rambling, repetitive speeches have warped public discourse worldwide. The political motivations are clear, since anti-intellectualism has always been foundational to authoritarianism, depriving the people of the framework with which to question power (no need to remind anyone who burned the books). In the US, elite universities are being defunded, investigative newspapers such as the Washington Post depleted and defanged. Everywhere, 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. We feel powerless in the face of this, and our acceptance of it is insidious: in the modern phrase, “It’s not that deep”, and in the casual they’re-all-as-bad-as-each-other disengagement that is undermining democracy.
Creatives have always had a close and thoughtful sense of the zeitgeist. Eloquence is part of being a cultural leader
And yet, at the very moment meme-fied inanity threatens to overwhelm us, some threads of popular culture are moving in the opposite direction. The contrasts can be jarring. Last September, during the week that Trump called climate change “the greatest con job” during a speech to the UN, the New York catwalk shows were taking place. At Proenza Schouler, the show notes came footnoted with a reading list of French feminist writings, including The Third Body by Hélène Cixous and Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray, while Joseph Altuzarra left a copy of The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa on every seat. One day in January, I read a news report about Trump confusing Greenland with Iceland four times in one speech, and then toggled to Vogue to read about the latest Saint Laurent menswear show, which was inspired by designer Anthony Vaccarello’s reading of James Baldwin’s seminal 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room.
Did you raise an eyebrow at the back there? It is worth interrogating the scepticism that creeps in any time fashion or glamour are put in the same category as thought or intellect. I refer you here to Dua Lipa’s author interviews, which are superb. In a chat with David Szalay, the author of Flesh, she asked him about the authorial decision to omit the protagonist’s father from a story that has so much to say about masculinity – a point that, Szalay notes, no reviewers had picked up on.
Rock’n’roll may have long set itself in opposition to being square, but the history of pop lyrics debunks the idea that pop stars are stupid. “Celebrities get called stupid if they don’t read, and stupid when they do,” says Hali Brown, the 30-year-old co-founder of BookTok’s @booksonthebedside. “So I don’t really know what people want them to do.” She has no time for the pearl‑clutching over “performative reading”. “Young people are definitely not divested from celebrity culture. If this makes people feel better about reading out and about, that’s good, right?” As Greene points out, “Creatives have always had a close and thoughtful sense of the zeitgeist. Eloquence is part of being a cultural leader.”
