Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.
When we speak, Katherine Angel has just returned from Milan—and her week has been a whirlwind. “It was pretty surreal because I don’t go to fashion things,” the author and psychologist says wonderingly of her appearance at Miu Miu’s fourth edition of its Literary Club, held during Salone del Mobile. “It was a different audience for me, for sure.”
For Angel, who is more accustomed to giving talks in political, scholarly, or book-world settings, the salon-inspired event marked a definite change of pace. “There were a lot of influencers there and some quite starry people: Alexa Chung and Emma Corrin. I felt like I was observing this world that I don’t have much contact with. And people seemed very attentive and eager to hear the conversations,” she says. The audience at her talk “was packed full of people and they were very engaged.”
Just when you think fashion might be reaching peak literature, think again. Yes, Kaia Gerber has a book club, style Substackers are pivoting to fiction, and practically every brand with an Ssense presence has dipped its Tabi’ed toes into the world of books. But while these collaborations usually live at the intersection of trendy “weird girl” novelists, Miu Miu’s event had a more academic feel, calling upon scholars and nonfiction writers and academics for an effect that was part MLA conference, part feast for the eyes. (Which makes sense, given that Mrs. Prada is the rare designer who also boasts a PhD.) The theme was “Politics of Desire,” and the three-day event included panels discussing the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Annie Ernaux’s memoir A Girl’s Story and the late playwright and author Ama Ata Aidoo’s novel Changes: A Love Story. Cultural theorist Olga Goriunova, the author of Ideal Subjects: The Abstract People of AI, delivered a lecture on “Desire After AI.” Held at Circolo Filologico Milanese, the city’s oldest cultural association, the event was curated by writer-researcher Olga Campofreda. On the final day, the space was transformed into a curated library with titles selected by feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti.
Angel, for her part, read from her book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, kicking off a conversation about consent with film critic Eliza Cuter. The two, Angel says, discussed “questions of trust; if it’s possible for people to have any measure of trust in the systems around them, but also their interpersonal relationships, given all the horrible stuff that is in the news all the time and people’s experience of sexual violence and coercion.” Angel also read an excerpt from her upcoming book, tentatively titled Poor Freud, a reexamination of the currently less-than-fashionable founder of modern psychology. The book is a stylistic departure for her, and one which she describes as “quite poetic and a little bit trippy and strange.”
Angel, as both participant and guest, appreciated the age diversity on display in the room, with presenters who ranged from their 20s to their 70s, representing “a real range of backgrounds and ethnicities. That felt really good because in a lot of literary or scholarly spaces, you often don’t have a very diverse set of people,” she says. While there was no Q&A segment, she was able to connect with attendees who were pursuing their own studies in her field and eager to discuss the issues raised by her talk.
Angel is well aware of the fact that intellectualism can risk becoming an aesthetic. But she appreciated the refreshingly analog, social nature of the multi-day event. She likens it to the resurgence in popularity of “fancy stationery shops, with beautiful notebooks in amazing textures,” she says. “You can sense that people, despite themselves, they’re being so—and I include myself—pulled into this frictionless world. There’s this craving for something that you can feel the textures and the rough edges of. And increasingly, I think that’s a really important political and ethical impulse—to want to encounter something interpersonally.
“Books, difficult conversations, lively conversations, textured notepaper, it’s part of this pullback towards something that we’ve lacked,” she adds. “There is a real hunger among young people for ideas and tools with which to make sense of a maddeningly nonsensical world.”
Shop the Miu Miu Literary Club’s Book Picks
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent by Katherine Angel
Ideal Subjects: The Abstract People of AI (Posthumanities) by Olga Goriunova
Changes: A Love Story by Ama Ata Aidoo
