Why Chic Women Are Gatekeeping
Estimated reading time 6 MINUTES
We've spent the past few years being told, in extraordinary detail, how to become almost any kind of person we want to be. TikTok can give you the old-money wardrobe, the French-girl beauty routine, the books to put on your coffee table and the restaurants to book when you get to Paris. Even the more niche references rarely stay niche for long. Once enough people start talking about something, the algorithm is very good at turning it into a look that the rest of us can recognise and recreate.
Some of this has been fun. Social media has opened up worlds that used to be much harder to access, and there's nothing wrong with finding a great hotel or discovering a designer because somebody posted about them. But it has also produced a slightly strange kind of lifestyle LARPing, where we can become fluent in the appearance of a life without necessarily knowing very much about the world it came from. You don't need to know anything about sailing to dress like you spend August on the Mediterranean, or have grown up around country houses to recreate an "old money" wardrobe.
After years of influencer culture, microtrends and increasingly specific aesthetics, it makes sense that we're becoming a little suspicious of things that can be copied too easily. If everyone knows the same five hotels, buys the same vintage watch and follows the same list of "things elegant women never wear," none of it tells us very much about the person anymore. The more accessible the visual codes of taste become, the more we seem to value the things that take longer to develop.
SO, WHAT HAPPENS WHEN EVERYONE KNOWS THE "CODES"?
This is where insight starts to matter. Anyone can find out which wine they're supposed to order, but having spent enough time learning about wine to know what you like is harder to imitate. The same goes for recognising a designer because you've followed their work, having your own favourite writers, knowing where you want to go when you visit a city, or being able to bring something to a conversation that didn't come from the same cultural shortlist everyone else saw online.
You can already see this change reflected back at us by the people and brands selling aspiration. Dior has put the covers of Dracula and Ulysses across its famous Book Tote. Miu Miu runs a Literary Club in Milan. Saint Laurent has its own bookstore in Paris, while Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber have both made reading a visible part of their public worlds. Books are the most obvious expression of something broader happening around taste, gatekeeping and cultural knowledge. After an era in which almost every desirable lifestyle could be broken down into a shopping list, knowing your way around the world is starting to carry a different kind of appeal.
TASTE IS GETTING HARDER TO FAKE
It's easy to look the part online. You can find the bag everyone wants, book the restaurant that keeps appearing on Instagram and save an entire holiday itinerary before you've even decided where to go. We have more access to good recommendations than ever, but we've also become very familiar with what happens next: something takes off, everybody wants it and suddenly it's everywhere.
What's harder to copy is specificity. The woman who loves fashion probably has designers she follows who aren't currently all over her feed. The friend who travels constantly will have strong opinions about where she'd go back to and where she wouldn't. Someone who loves food might send you across town for one particular dish rather than the restaurant with the longest waiting list. There's personality in those preferences because they've come from experience rather than a list.
And that changes what feels impressive. Having access to beautiful things is still aspirational, but so is being able to choose between them. The person with the most interesting recommendation in the group is rarely the one repeating the place everyone has already seen online. She's usually the one who has tried enough, seen enough or read enough to have something better to suggest.
WE'RE ALSO TIRED OF EVERYTHING BECOMING A "CORE"
It's hard not to feel a little exhausted by how quickly everything gets turned into a trend now. You find a hobby you like and six months later there's a name for the aesthetic, a uniform to wear while doing it and endless videos explaining how to do it properly. Places go through the same cycle. Someone posts a tiny restaurant they loved on holiday, the video takes off and suddenly half your feed has been there.
So perhaps we can forgive people for becoming a bit more protective of their favourite things. Gatekeeping used to be one of those online behaviours people loved to call out, particularly when somebody posted an outfit or a restaurant and then refused to share where it was from. Lately, the mood around it feels less clear-cut. There are still plenty of irritating examples, but there's also a growing sense that we don't have to broadcast every good thing we find to thousands of strangers.
I can understand the appeal. Some of the best recommendations are the ones passed around between friends because somebody knows what you like, or the places you come across while travelling and remember for years afterwards. There's a pleasure in having your own little collection of favourites, and in being able to introduce someone else to one of them.
It also makes being well connected and culturally aware more valuable. If the obvious recommendations are available to all of us within seconds, the person with something better to suggest stands out. She may have heard about it from a friend, read about it somewhere you don't follow or simply spent enough time interested in the subject to look beyond the obvious choices. That feels much closer to what being "in the know" has always meant.
AND THEN THERE'S AI
Then AI came along and gave us even more to choose from. We can make images, write stories, create music, plan trips and generate endless ideas without waiting for somebody else to publish them first. We're already seeing the less glamorous side of that in the amount of AI content filling our feeds, and there's only so much of it any of us can possibly care about.
Which makes having a good filter surprisingly important. If there are thousands of books you could read, films you could watch and places you could visit, adding another thousand AI-generated suggestions doesn't necessarily help. You still need to decide what deserves your time, what you like and whose recommendations you trust.
That may be where knowledge gains rather than loses some of its status. The friend who knows a lot about interiors can spot when something beautiful is badly designed. Someone who reads widely can usually tell when an idea isn't particularly new. The more material AI gives us, the more valuable it becomes to have enough background to sort through it without being impressed by everything that looks convincing
THE MOST INTERESTING WOMEN ARE INTERESTED
Books are getting most of the attention at the moment, probably because they fit so neatly into this new version of aspiration. You can put Ulysses on a Dior bag, photograph a model reading on the front row or build a celebrity book club around them. But being interesting has never depended on having read the right novels.
Think about the women you could happily sit next to at dinner for hours. One might spend half the evening telling you about a tiny hotel she found in Palermo and another might somehow get you interested in an architect you'd never heard of. Someone else could be obsessed with Formula One, antique jewellery, gardening, contemporary dance or the history of perfume. Often it's the enthusiasm that pulls you in. You leave wanting to look something up, go somewhere or carry on the conversation another time.
And those interests don't need to look impressive on paper. In fact, some of the most memorable ones probably won't. There's a big difference between picking up hobbies because they suit the person you want to appear to be and following something simply because you can't stop reading, watching or talking about it. Over time, you end up with stories to tell, opinions people remember and recommendations your friends come back for.
Perhaps that's why the current obsession with books only tells part of the story. The woman everyone wants to sit next to at dinner might be brilliantly well read, but she could just as easily spend the evening talking about a building she saw in Mexico City, why she thinks a particular Formula One team has got its strategy completely wrong or the antique ring she's been trying to track down for months. Having something you're really interested in gives people a glimpse of who you are, which is far more compelling than ticking off another symbol of good taste.
IF YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW
A Birkin is still a status symbol, but almost everyone knows what one looks like now. You don't need to own one, or even spend much time around Hermès, to understand what it represents. And with replicas, rentals and endless luxury content online, looking the part has become possible for far more people.
So some status symbols are far less obvious. Take The Row. Its clothes are extremely expensive, but much of what it sells would mean very little to someone who doesn't follow fashion. There's no reason everyone needs to recognise the coat, because the people who care about The Row probably will.
The same thing happens socially. You don't need everyone in the room to understand a reference for it to matter. Sometimes the fun is finding the one person who does and ending up in a conversation you wouldn't have had otherwise.
That's where books and culture fit into all of this. Putting Ulysses on a Dior bag doesn't suddenly make literature a luxury, and carrying it doesn't tell us whether someone has read Joyce. But it does give people something else to connect over besides the bag itself. For one person it might simply be a print she likes; for another, it might remind her of a book she loved, hated or never managed to finish.
Perhaps the status isn't really in the book at all. It's in being part of a world where there are more things to notice than the price tag.
Having something you're really interested in gives people a glimpse of who you are, which is far more compelling than ticking off another symbol of good taste.
SO, IS KNOWLEDGE REALLY THE NEWEST STATUS SYMBOL?
Of course, none of this is entirely new. Books, education, travel and cultural interests have always said something about the circles we move in and the lives we've had. What's interesting now is seeing them become such a visible part of the same aspirational culture that has spent years selling us handbags, hotel rooms and beautifully photographed lives.
Some of it will be performance. Ulysses looks good on a Dior tote whether you've read it or not, and a book club can be as much a social event as it is about the book. But perhaps we've become too used to treating anything aspirational as evidence that somebody is pretending. People really do read on holiday, care about art, become obsessed with obscure subjects and spend dinner talking about something other than where they bought their shoes.
And maybe that's the part worth paying attention to. The aspirational woman hasn't lost the beautiful clothes, the extraordinary trips or any of the other things we've spent years looking at online. We're simply being shown more of who she is beyond them. She has interests that have nothing to do with what she can buy, opinions that won't necessarily photograph well and enough curiosity to keep pulling her towards something new. If that is becoming part of what we admire in other women, it says far more about this moment than the sudden appearance of books in fashion ever could.
Whether that counts as a new status symbol probably matters less than what it says about the kind of life people now desire. After years of being shown how to look cool and interesting, perhaps we're becoming more interested in actually being interesting.