Style & Substance

How writers became the fashion world's secret weapon to sell luxury handbags

Left to right: Zadie Smith for Bottega; Joan Didion for Celine; Tavi Gevinson for Alexis Bittar; Barbara Chase-Riboud for Bottega

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after a career in fashion magazines it’s that fashion loves to shock. Sometimes that shock is with sex. Tom Ford at 90s Gucci say, who managed to make orgies and Brazilian bikini waxes appear to be the chicest things on earth. Other times that shock is loud and visceral, such as Balenciaga’s Spring/Summer 2020 show where prosthetically-enhanced models stalked the catwalk like extras from Channel 5’s Botched Up Bodies with over-pumped faces and engorged lips. And sometimes fashion gets its woefully wrong such as Sisley’s 2007 ‘fashion junkie’ ad, a campaign so bat-shit egregious that it was banned within months of hitting billboards.

But this season’s most shocking campaign does not feature 19-year old supermodels play acting at being drug addicts, cosmetic surgery play things or lusty swingers. Instead it features a 49-year old author with zero social media profile who looks not towards but away from the camera, the crop so close as to obscure the very clothes she is wearing.

That Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta have chosen writer Zadie Smith to front their Spring/Summer 2025 campaign is both dazzling and shocking. (It should be pointed out that the campaign also features other creatives such as sculptor and poet Barabara Chase-Riboud and writer/musician Neneh Cherry.) Of all contemporary cultural icons Smith is the one with perhaps the most mystique. Steadfastly anti-social media and with a literary output that averages out at about a novel every half decade, Zadie Smith represent luxury better than anyone else you could care to name: she is slow, considered, deeply intellectual and about as far from internet culture as it’s possible to get. (I tried to get in touch with her recently, until a mutual friend told me she only keeps an old-fashioned flip phone, thus further adding to the allure.)

The Sisley campaign that was banned

A 2007 Dolce advert that caused outrage

Of course, Zadie Smith is not the first author to front a fashion campaign. As many have pointed out, an 80-year old Joan Didion did it a decade earlier when she fronted Celine’s sunglasses campaign back in 2015. The Didion campaign is now iconic -though I have no idea if it sold any sunglasses; conveying as it did the intellectual-soft-power vibe that then designer Phoebe Philo worked so hard to channel. And which, by the way, she ultimately succeeded in doing.

But the choice to feature Zadie Smith is something altogether different. This is as much about muse representing brand (luxury, craft-centric, devastatingly good-looking- which lets’ be frank, Zadie Smith is) as it is about cultural commentary.

Why this campaign has got it so spot on is because it’s channeled into something altogether more universal- the desire to slow down, look within, a retreat from influencer culture and a shift in focus from exteriority to interiority.

Do you feel it too? The utter exhaustion from a life spent being ‘on’. Because that’s what social media has done to us. Our holiday photos are now carefully curated montages set to music; meals out with loved ones are photographed until the food freezes over; an opinion shared with a friend is now a Tik Tok with the volume turned up on that opinion (meaner, funnier, more left, more right, more everything); Facebook hasn’t been a place for friends and family for over 20 years; instead it’s now private, venomous group chats; it’s a marketplace to buy and sell the most unloved things in your life, it’s one long dribbling feed of random faces and half-baked opinions.

We’ve spent years, decades in some cases, clamouring for attention; guzzling bite-sized opinions on teeny tiny screens by people whose names we do not know and whose motives we are even less clear about. We have opened ourselves up the world in a way that was inconceivable when we were growing up. Most of us have hundreds, thousands in many cases, of connections across social media, with people we would probably not even sit down to have a cup of coffee with. And yet we give them access to our lives; we allow their judgements to cloud our days; we read and ingest their comments, we reply to their DMs. This is intellectual death by a thousands nuts.

But who do we turn in time of crisis? If we’re smart we turn to writers; those who have the ability to cognitively sit apart form the fray and make sense of it all. Wilfred Owen made sure we understood the human cost of war with his poetry; Toni Morrison ensured the world fully grasped the complexity of the African American experience through her books; whilst John Steinbeck made it his life’s work to give the poor and dispossessed a place in every heart and mind.

Both writing and reading as well as cogitating (which is what good writing should make you do) all take time. And space. Real writers do not rely on likes and popularity to form their ideas; they couldn’t care less about online pile-ons; they would never work with an algorithm or lean on AI. They simply don’t care about keeping up or being current or having the sort of opinion that flies well on social media. They write because there’s an alchemical furnace inside of them that is one part passion to two parts cultural urgency.

And isn’t that true luxury? To be so utterly self-determined in a world where everyone else kowtows and follows.

The Tiffany ad campaign

And that’s why fashion- which has always been more about aspiration than inspiration- is having a moment with writers. The first event that Chanel will host at Gabrielle Chanel’s recently refurbished Provencal home, La Pausa, is a writers’ retreat for women. A recent Tiffany ad campaign featured literary quotes by authors- Rumi, Plato, Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Diane Ackerman. DKNY meanwhile used quotes by 80s classic tome- Bright Lights Big City for their new ad campaign, although honestly it would have been so much cooler to use 70-year old author Jay McInerney. This season Prada even commissioned author Ottessa Moshfegh to create a limited-edition book of short stories as part of their Spring/Summer 2025 campaign.

Because here is what fashion understands: writers are a vibe. They are an expensive vibe. They represent the desire for a smaller, more intellectual, more considered life. And they are a vibe that does not change with cultural whims. (Which does beg the question: should writers be selling themselves short by fronting that most fickle of things: fashion campaigns?)

After 20 years of social media with its lusty, look-at-me, dopamine-searching, aesthetically-obsessed values and thoughtless, throwaway commentary our souls are weary; our brains are fried. It’s like we’ve been dining out on intellectual fast food for over 2 decades. We need something else. We need a pause. We need contemplation. We need thinkers not rabble rousers; those who can help us see the bigger, wider picture, not dial in on the pointless minutiae.

And that’s the gift only writers (and artists) can give to the world. Which frankly is a far more luxurious gift than a £2000 designer handbag.