I check Instagram roughly once a fortnight, and there’s a single account that keeps me coming back — Kaia Gerber’s.
Gerber, 22, is the daughter of 90s supermodel Cindy Crawford, and yes, she has inherited every single cell of her mother’s asymmetrically perfect features. She’s now a successful model in her own right but also a keen reader, a book reader, and in the past few years, she’s made it part of her public identity.
Since 2020, she’s worked hard to cultivate the image of a stylish book-worm. She’s made sure the world knows she reads and that we know she’s a thinker. Gone are the days of the bookworm image, of the girl with glasses reading in her pjs in bed.
In September 2020, Gerber posted a screenshot to her 10 million followers on Instagram of a scene from Richard Benjamin’s 1990 movie Mermaids, starring Cher and Winona Ryder.
The image shows Cher in a bathtub, reading Grace Metalious’ 1956 novel Peyton Place, looking beautiful, focused and cerebral. Next to her, Winona Ryder, who plays her daughter in the movie, peers up towards the corner of the camera, obviously distracted by some agitated feelings towards her mother, who seems lost in her book.
Suddenly, I was interested.
The book Gerber was promoting that week, Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists, had nothing to do with the film, but that single post piqued my interest.
A few months earlier in March, Gerber had started a virtual bookclub via her Instagram as a way for her to connect with writers, other celebrities and friends during the pandemic. The first book was Sally Rooney’s Normal People – whose fans are the OG of ‘the stylish reader’. In her first live chat, she spoke with Daisy-Edgar Jones and Paul Mascal, stars of the screen adaptation of the novel.
Her book selections were diverse, and her intentions were noble. In May, she selected Spring Awakening, the late 19th century classic play by German dramatist Frank Wedekind, in order to “raise awareness for the performing arts industry in nyc. theaters are closed for the time being, putting so many actors, writers, and crew members out of work,” as Gerber described in a post on Instagram.
“It’s really important that we keep supporting the community that plays such a large & important role to the city.”
Over the next few months and years, Gerber would invite the likes of Lena Dunham, Jia Tolentino, Michelle Zauner (Japanese Breakfast) and Raven Leilani onto her platform to talk about their books. These women have huge cultural capital and radiate an equal measure of affable coolness, intelligence and obtainable beauty.
Gerber would continue to post images on Instagram of beautiful women reading, either from photos, or screenshots from movies. It didn’t matter that most of the images had nothing to do with the books themselves. Gerber knew how to get someone like me interested.
I’m a female reader, a book reader, and I aspire to be beautiful. Inevitably, in my own life, I separate these two pursuits. When I read, I’m mostly always in some loose, flimsy outfit, sprawled across my sofa chair in my study, looking more like a sloth on a tree than a presentable woman. The last thing on my mind is trying to appear beautiful.
But these women, women like Gerber, and her fellow supermodel friends who read, including Dua Lipa, Emily Ratajkowski and Camille Rowe, have harnessed Instagram’s most fundamental currency — hot privilege, and began a movement to aestheticise book reading.
And by book reading, I mean, actual books. Physical, paper items. You won’t see a kindle anywhere here.
The books on Gerber’s bookclub list are carefully selected to exude a certain sensibility. Think east-coast elites. Think oat-milk drinking hipsters who wear white linen shirts and own more than two pairs of Birkenstocks. Carrying a book, or at least, appearing to consume its content, has become another gesture towards aspirational living. Not only do we need to appear to be taking care of our outward appearances — we need to cultivate the right kind of intellectual and cerebral agendas.
This week, Gerber, along with her friend Alyssa Reeder, (a New York City-bred writer and editor who writes for Into the Gloss) launched Library Science.
The site collects all the books she’s had on her bookclub so far; all 34 books, it’s 33 authors, most of them American. Joan Didion appears twice. And of course she does. Her books (along with her cult status among liberal white women) is the basis upon which all the other books instantiate.
Another late author on the list is Françoise Sagan, who has an equally pertinent status among women who pay very close attention to the fabric of their clothes.
The majority of authors on Gerber’s list are women and out of the 33 authors, nine are people of colour, or mixed race. Five are late authors. There is one trans author. Most of them went to Ivy league colleges, or were born into privilege and celebrity, as Gerber has.
Wealth and affluence can provide one with a certain cultural capital – in Gerber’s case, she’s used it to curate a literary milieu. They can be “taste” makers. But what does it mean to have “taste”? More importantly, who adjudicates this metric? Today, it seems that the answer is beautiful people who know how to market themselves. Personally, I believe the gay American writer, Ocean Vuong was the first to aestheticize that very singular, New York City-artist image. Just check out his IG to know what I mean.
Initially, I was drawn to Gerber’s ethereal beauty. I love looking at pretty people. But pretty people who read?! Irresistible. Before my private divorce from social media, my favourite Instagram account was @hotdudesreading. The female equivalent is @coolgirlsreadingbooks. Somehow, it feels less of a novelty to see an attractive woman reading than it is to see an attractive man reading. The Internet agrees with me, because the former account has more than a million followers, while the latter has only 48.7K followers.
As I said before, Instagram runs on hot privilege. And Gerber knows how to milk it. Looking to be well read is now a visual pursuit. It’s aspirational to appear to be well-read. And though her Library Science hasn’t inspired me to amend my break-up with Instagram, I agree with the platform’s philosophy: “We learn the most from the stories that aren’t our own.”