Summer is winding down, but there’s still time to squeeze in some vacation reading. And if you prefer that your books come in beautifully accessorized packaging paired with color-matched popsicles—well, you missed your chance, but you can still read the novels.
Back in June, the luxury fashion brand Miu Miu staged a pop-up book giveaway in eight cities, spanning the globe from New York to Tokyo. Those willing to wait in line scored a frozen treat and two novels by female writers, chosen from a selection of three: Forbidden Notebook (1952), by the Italian-Cuban journalist and novelist Alba de Céspedes; A Woman (1906), by the Italian feminist Sibilla Aleramo; and Persuasion (1817), by Jane Austen, who needs no introduction here.
According to Miu Miu, the giveaway was about furthering the brand’s “commitment to contemporary thought and culture” while celebrating each author’s “brave and powerfully influential status as female creator.”
Vogue Business noted that some crasser motives might also be at work, since luxury fashion brands benefit in several ways by aligning themselves with literature. Among those benefits: Books connote intellectualism and cultural prestige; literature has a less market-driven, materialistic image than the visual arts do; and reading dovetails with luxury branding because the time it takes to read a book is a luxury in itself.
“To read all of Miu Miu’s suggested works would likely take the reader past Paris Fashion Week in September,” one publisher told the site.
This is true only if you read v-e-r-y slowly. Together, Miu Miu’s three books total about eight hundred pages, and Paris Fashion Week starts fifteen weeks after the June giveaway. That works out to a daily reading quota of perhaps eight pages. Heck, you could start now, with just a month to go before the catwalks unroll, and still finish all three novels by reading just twenty-nine pages a day.
But I’m not here to mock the reading fluency of fashionistas. (OK, maybe a little bit.) I’m more interested in why Miu Miu placed Austen in such not-exactly-intuitive literary company. The internet informs me that both Aleramo and de Céspedes were political activists, and that their novels (which I haven’t read) touch on such topics as rape, domestic violence, attempted suicide, sexual discontent, and Italian imperialism. Their married, employed, middle-class protagonists seem a long way from Austen’s sheltered, privileged virgins.
But these days, it’s commonplace to see Jane Austen as the founding mother of all fiction by women, and to assume that treating women’s inner lives and domestic choices as worthy subjects for the novel, as Austen does, is an inherently subversive and feminist act. By those lights, Austen is just as much a “brave and powerfully influential” feminist as her more militant twentieth-century inheritors.
Not saying I disagree—just noting that this interpretation, which we tend to take for granted nowadays, is a relatively recent development in Austen studies, dating back no further than the 1970s. But for us, apparently, it’s such conventional wisdom that it fits uncontroversially into luxury fashion branding. How times change. Eat your popsicle.
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