Reading Through New York Fashion Week

Welcome back to Reliable Narrator! I’m writing to you all from about halfway through New York Fashion Week, one of my favorite times of year. The outfit inspiration! The VIP watching! The moments to embarrass myself in the name of editor-POV content! The latter is what happened outside the Tibi show, when I was asked to film a “What’s in My Bag” and had no choice but to pull out Callie Hart’s Quicksilver alongside my favorite lip gloss and Chanel wallet. (Listen, there is a lot of time between shows. I’d rather read on the train than do a mindless scroll.) Please defend my honor and/or taste in the comments when this goes up on TikTok…..

I’ve been employed to spot celebrities in the front rows and analyze trends across several publications for nearly a decade now. While I did get a kick out of catching Kendall Jenner on the runway at my first Khaite show last night, I’ve been most excited about a development I’m sharing with you all, here. It is, to put it simply, a season that where reading is front and center.

Literature worms its way into the collections every year. Joseph Altuzarra, one of the more exclusive invites on the NYC calendar, always gives his guests a book that informed his latest collection. One year it was Moby Dick. This year, it was The Memory Police, about an island where an Orwellian police force removes memories from its citizens at random. Timely!

Show notes sometimes reference quotes, movements, and scenes by iconic authors; I think I caught a snippet of the Sense and Sensibility score as a soundtrack one year. There’s a bit of that going on again this season, but I’m also clocking more references to being well-read as a posture. Or, a way of signaling to the world around you that you’re as interested in developing your mind as your wardrobe. Here are few examples:

• Anna Sui directed her guests to Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture by Lois Palken Rudnick as a guiding reference for her Spring 2026 collection. Some guests were spotted flipping through the book, studying an early 1920s artists commune in New Mexico, before the show started.

• Brandon Maxwell’s models carried rolled-up copies of the NYT on top of their leather bags—making the daily news look as aspirational as his A+ outerwear.

• One new brand holding presentations this week is called Literary Sport. On its website, it defines itself as “refined activewear for opting into motion.” In practice, this looks like a $355 button-up cardigan or a chocolate brown set of a sports bra and capris. I suspect their target customer is the girl who’s reading A Little Life on the way to New York Pilates in Flatiron.

• Instead of party favors, ShopBop gave out copies of The Fran Lebowitz Reader to guests at their intimate NYFW dinner.

My favorite permutation of all the above comes from Rachel Comey. She’s a NYC-based designer who doesn’t show every season, nor does she have huge collections. Her work is wearable but not basic; it’s grounded in a brand of practicality that’s also lively and fun. (One of my first splurges as a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar was a Rachel Comey sweater I found on-sale at Saks. It’s a minty light green button-up that I wear to work with a poplin midi skirt or jeans.)

This season, Comey was thinking about “clients' lives rich with work pursuits that often have them traveling. The unpredictability of weather calls for layers, versatile items, functional fibers, relaxed tailoring, and ease... always ease. These occasions are our focus this season, sprinkled with a few escapes and a few evenings off.“

One such layer fit for a highly specific occasion is a tweed cardigan blazer. As Comey describes it, “It's unlined but structured, casual, and versatile. The client can wear it for that travel/work event (a book tour, say) and then again as an evening jacket over a metallic dress.”

I think there’s something so textbook chic about wanting to dress the creative class, and in something that’s an inspired twist on a classic (a literary blazer). At the same time, I appreciate how this garment is a little more down-to-earth, a tad more everyday than Comey’s previous collaboration with The New York Review of Books. All this to say: If my novel ever makes it out of Google Docs and into a hardbound copy, please let me promote it in head-to-toe Rachel Comey.

Big picture, it’s still early in the Spring 2026 season and way too much of a generalization to assign every book reference a shared meaning. But, the titles I’m seeing so far (not best-sellers, a little obscure) and the way designers associate with writers (dressing them for moments when they’re deep in thought, but also just living life!) picks up an interesting thread. It’s for a world I want to live in even if the individual collections don’t necessarily speak to me: One where we’re reading and having discussions and treating great stories like the luxury they are!

This takes me back to June, when Jonathan Anderson, the new creative director of Dior, kicked off his tenure at a menswear show with a re-imagining of Dior’s famed “book tote.” Under his purview, the brocade bags formerly monogrammed for influencers on vacation in Sicily now resemble vintage covers of actual books: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and so on. It’s a wearable pun—the book tote as a literal book—and a flare signal for more challenging stories than the titles that might get surfaced in our day-to-day feeds. (When was the last time you saw an influencer pushing copies of a 19th-century novel?)

Whether the fashion people and celebrities who are carrying the new book tote have read the classics that inspired each one is a mystery. But seeing anyone with a following acting as a walking billboard for great works of fiction is a treat to me. Especially for works of literature that subverted norms/pushed the potential of the written word as form/are intergenerational bangers. (Reading Madame Bovary in a junior-year college literature course changed my life, if you can’t tell!) Then again, there’s a question of the likely four-digit cost to carry this tote, when one could just pick up the book from the library for free…

Anyway! Regardless of the final product, I personally like to see designers inspired by more than, I don’t know, scrolling online. I hope there’s more of this to unravel and unpack in the weeks to come. I’m traveling to Milan Fashion Week for the first time this season and plan to do some associated reading while I’m there. I’ll also be keeping my eyes peeled for more literary references on the runways.

Up next: Later this week, paid subscribers will get an essay-slash-review of a book about hell that also reminds me of working in fashion. There’s a reason this one will be behind a paywall! Soon, we’ll also have a survey of Hot Shakespeare Fall (it’s on the horizon!) and a chat with one of my favorite contemporary authors on her tour wardrobe. Monthly Reliable Recs will return on September 30.

Thanks for reading! Xo, Halie