Getting Booked: Here’s What 5 Models Read Backstage During the Spring 2027 Season

Reported by Vogue.

Fashion month is a logistical marathon before it's ever a spectacle — four cities, hundreds of shows, and an ungodly number of hours spent in casting waiting rooms and makeup chairs. Models know this better than anyone. According to Vogue, five of them used the Spring 2027 season to do something quietly radical with all that dead time: they read.

The list spans a lot of ground. Stella Hanan finished Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You — a novel she'd started over the summer and carried through the chaos of Fashion Week. She was drawn to how Rooney maps the texture of human connection: the way people communicate, pull apart, come back together. "I think it's very relatable," Hanan said simply, which, given that the book is essentially about two women conducting an entire friendship through letters and email while their love lives quietly unravel, feels like an understatement in the best way. Iasmin Reis went in a different direction entirely, picking up Freida McFadden's psychological thriller Brain Damage after a friend's recommendation and a cover that stopped her cold. The hook? A structure that unfolds the mystery in real time alongside the protagonist — you learn what happened exactly when she does.

Old Texts, New Context

Sunday Rose brought a nearly 90-year-old play into her backstage rotation. After catching a London revival of Clifford Odets' Golden Boy — starring Josh O'Connor at the Almeida — she went straight to the 1937 source material. What kept her: the play's unflinching take on what people sacrifice chasing wealth and fame over actual passion, and an ending that refuses to reward the fantasy. "It felt more realistic and less fantasized," she said. Meanwhile, Canlan Wang gravitated toward Chinese forensic crime novelist Qin Ming's Medical Examiner Dr. Qin, citing the particular pleasure of suspense fiction — the adrenaline, yes, but also the way it opens doors into worlds you'd never otherwise enter. And Thalita Ferreira read Socorro Acioli's The Head of the Saint, a Brazilian novel braiding together faith, magical realism, and mystery. For Ferreira, it wasn't just a good book — it was a tether back to home.

What this list quietly argues is that the models best equipped to survive fashion month are the ones who've figured out how to be somewhere else entirely while they wait — and that the somewhere else doesn't have to be escapist. Rooney's emotional rigor, Odets' moral weight, Acioli's cultural specificity: none of this is beach reading. It's serious, chosen with intention, and that says something worth noting about who these women actually are when the cameras aren't rolling.

The runway is the job — the book in your bag is the self.

Read the original at Vogue.