10 books that every designer should read
Put down that copy of Orlando – there are so many other great books that haven’t informed fashion collections yet.
By Rosalind Jana
In his 1941 short story ‘The Library of Babel’, Borges imagined a universe composed entirely of books: endless volumes containing every possible combination of every possible word, their meaning ranging from nonsense to genius. Our own world might not quite reach the literary infinite (the British Library holds approximately 14 million books on 625 kilometres of shelving), but, if one took the fashion industry as their reading guide, they might be mistaken for thinking that the sum total of humanity’s fiction could sit on a single, slim shelf. Browsing for novels frequently referenced by designers, one would find the following dog-eared volumes, same pages turned down and passages underlined: Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818), Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847), Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde, 1890), Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925), Orlando (Virginia Woolf, 1928), Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier, 1938), and Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955).
These are not bad choices. Many have ended up on lists of the most beloved and respected books of all time. All are fertile design stimulus. Frankenstein’s gothic body horror has given designers from Rei Kawakubo to Miuccia Prada an unsettling imaginative framework (and plenty more an excuse to patchwork and splice clashing fabrics). Alice in Wonderland offers a psychedelic fantasia of proportion gone wrong and rules turned upside down. Rebecca is a chilling – and thrilling – study of the tyranny exerted by a dead woman’s wardrobe.
One of the oddest and most tantalising parts of the design process is the initial stage of inspiration. It is accepted that the designer may go it alone, driven by an instinctive sense of silhouette or colour, but often the richest work comes from a collision with something external: a film, a painting, a flea market find, an imprint left by a wet leaf on the pavement. The novel sits among these resources as one of the strangest and most underexploited – not a visual object, but an invitation to fill the imaginative gap between words and world.
Alchemised properly, literature encourages not only the storytelling impulse that elevates a collection from pure commerce to creative act, but a way of understanding clothing as vessels for the desires, tensions, fantasies and social negotiations that make up the fabric of human life. When John Galliano presented his first major collection in 1985, its primary source was Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus: a novel published the year prior about a Cockney aerialiste who may or may not be half bird. In an anarchic flourish that Carter would surely have loved, model Mimi Potworowska flung fresh mackerel at the audience. His contemporary Alexander McQueen cited Dante, H.G. Wells and the Marquis de Sade. More recently, Grace Wales Bonner has positioned herself within an intellectual lineage that includes James Baldwin, the Harlem Renaissance, and the cultural and spiritual traditions of the African diaspora.
The weight of available inspiration is, in the age of the digitised archive alone, not quite Borgesian but it’s also not far off. There is no excuse for the mood board that contains the same references as everyone else’s. If I had my way, every design house would employ a literary consultant tasked with finding the right books to reference. Ideally, I would be that consultant. In the absence of such a role, I have compiled a starter list of novels that might serve as design fuel, chosen according to specific criteria: the richness of their world building, the productive friction of their themes and stakes, the singularity of the characters who inhabit them. Some of them mention clothing. Many don’t. You don’t need to read about a dress to find a new way to make one.
1) The Ice Palace, Tarjei Vesaas (1963)
There are novels that build worlds so complete and specific that a designer could walk straight into them and start rooting around. Take Tarjei Vesaas’s The Ice Palace (1963). Set in a crystalline Norwegian winter, its central motif – and location – is a frozen waterfall that has become a vast, lucent labyrinth. Looking down on it, Unn, one of the novel’s two girls, sees “an enchanted world of small pinnacles, gables, frosted domes, soft curves, and confused tracery.” It is a place at once irresistible and sinister: “it shone ice-blue and green of itself, and deathly cold.” One can imagine the fun Alexander McQueen might have had with such an image – majesty and menace held in perfect equilibrium. But the novel is not only a visual feast. At its heart is the relationship between Siss and Unn, bound together by an instinctive, suspicious mutual attraction that, like water beneath ice, moves without surfacing. Unn walks into the ice palace one morning and does not come back. Siss is left to endure a grief she doesn’t understand. Vesaas writes with the spare (and sometimes surreal) luminosity of a fable – full of intense feeling that falls like snow and finds new shape with the inevitable thaw.
2) The Snow Ball, Brigid Brophy (1964)
There is a literary tradition of the great party scene: the fancy-dress party in Rebecca, the painful social performances of Molly Keane, the carnivalesque excess of Colette. The Snow Ball (1964) is an especially glittering example. Brigid Brophy spins her novel out over a single, 18th-century themed New Year’s Eve do. In the crush stands Anna K, dressed as Donna Anna from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, navigating her desire for a masked stranger who has arrived as the Don himself. It is a novel that intimately understands costume as both revelation and concealment. “Have you noticed what a metaphysical ball this is?” the masked man asks Anna. “All these people bumping into each other and asking ‘who are you?’ even when they’ve known each other for years.” Here identity becomes malleable and desire operates through disguise. The prose fizzes: chandeliers, mirrors, crooked wigs, a hostess in golden lamé stealing peppermint creams. Brophy is funny, and fabulous – a reminder that pleasure, too, is a serious pursuit.