Whatever you think of Hailey Bieber – a polarising love her or loathe her celebrity figure – you have to admit one thing: she is a trendsetter. Where she leads, we follow. If Hailey Bieber says it’s cool to wear jorts or do our make-up inspired by tiramisu, we do it. If Hailey Bieber says we need ‘glazed donut nails’, we get them. If Hailey Bieber tells us books are the new cool girl accessory, we dutifully head down to Waterstones.
Always at the forefront of a trend, in 2016 Hailey Bieber – then Baldwin – kicked off the Lit Girl era with a celebrity rite of passage. By which I mean she did a ‘What’s In My Bag’ video for Vogue. In the video, Hailey Baldwin Bieber, a woman who did not graduate from high school, even though she was literally home-schooled, revealed an odd item amongst the standard fare of lip-glosses and Stanley Cups and whatever else celebrities’ publicists plant in there for these videos. She was carrying around a medical textbook. “I might as well still be educating myself on something”, she said of the medical terminology short course material.
Less than a decade later, the collective groan we might have heard in the aftermath of that statement has disappeared. Now, every celebrity is at it. Dua Lipa has been reading (and posting pictures of) 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez on every holiday she’s been on (and she goes on a lot of holidays) for about three years. Her book club, hosted on website Service 95, sees her interviewing authors like Max Porter and Guadelupe Lette. Anya Taylor-Joy’s giving out her summer reading list. Hailey Bieber has returned to get involved in the celeb Lit Girl trend too, obviously – her latest, upgraded bag haul contained books by Nietzsche and Kant.
The famous-woman-loves-books-actually mania reached its apex this week, when Sarah Jessica Parker revealed that, as part of her new gig as judge on the literal Booker Prize, she devours on average two books a day. “Any opportunity that exists to read, I’m reading”, SJP said.
X content
Together, this class of celebrity makes up the archetype of the Lit Girl. A spin on the traditional It Girl, the Lit Girl is defined by her chic mobile library. Think of it as a variation of the iconic Gillian Flynn ‘cool girl’ monologue. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is smart. Cool girl reads, and you should too.
A Lit Girl doesn’t have to be famous, even. You can spot her on your Instagram feed any other day, artfully positioning a Fitzcarraldo edition in the lower left hand corner of an sun-kissed Instagram story, communicating that she is someone who is elegant and academic, someone who reads at a park – when she’s not on her phone taking pictures of it, that is. Or perhaps she’s at a coffee shop, a copy of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen perched next to her matcha. Or perhaps she’s underlined some paragraphs of bell hooks’s all about love, hopeful it will be screenshotted by a man who doesn’t care whether she lives or dies (no comment on whether I’ve done this one myself). (I have.) Her social media presence – her real life presence even – is accented by literature. She carries books, she poses with books. The Lit Girl is a woman who reads.
Whether any of this is true or not, whether the spines on any of those books have actually been cracked, is much less interesting than the fact that these Lit Girls want the rest of us to believe it is. They want girls to read because girls reading is chic. And we do, at least if the growing gender gap in readers (and writers) is anything to go by.
Instagram content
Like all influencer trends, our knee-jerk reaction is, of course, to be snide about this. These women are not really reading, we think to ourselves, automatically. They’re not real intellectuals. They’re fake. And they are, of course, girls.
There are no Lit Boys out there – even though it’s an archetype that has an obvious male equivalent. A man who shoves dog-eared copies of Hemingways and Kerouacs in the back pockets of his Carhartt jeans. A man who ‘just doesn’t really rate Sally Rooney’ and quotes Frank O’Hara at you and perhaps has an F Scott Fitzgerald stick’n’poke tattoo. Of course, Lit Boys exist, but they don’t inspire the same ire as Lit Girls.
Plenty of us know the Cool Girl speech off by heart. It would be nice if we remembered the other quote that followed it. “I waited patiently – years – for the pendulum to swing the other way”, Flynn, as Amy Dunne, writes. “For men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organise scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.” Nobody makes fun of Lit Boys, Cool Boys, Boy Authors, Boy Book Bloggers, Boy Influencers. The girls, however, are open season. And Lit Girls, a subsection of one of the only female dominated industries in the world (influencer marketing) is no exception.
Of course, like all ‘girl-coded’ trends, there are of course issues here. The Lit Girl trend celebrates reading, but with diminutive caveats. You must be seen in public reading to count as a Lit Girl, you must be beautiful to count, you must be cool to count. But there are worse trends for influencers, famous and normie alike, to push on us. In an online world celebrating Mounjaro supermarket finds and being a post-modern bimbo, maybe there’s not much harm in being a Lit Girl.
