How Norman Foster made the classic architect studio go global

Celebrated founder has structured his practice in unusual ways to promote creativity 

John Gapper

Lord Norman Foster sits in the open-plan main studio of Foster + Partners by the River Thames at Battersea, recalling the way architects once worked. “It’s probably easier to explain with a drawing,” he says, leaning forward to his notebook to sketch in pencil how rolls of paper were fed to desks before personal computers. 

Much has changed since Foster founded his own architectural practice in 1967 with his late wife Wendy. Foster + Partners has embraced the computer age and is a great deal bigger and more global. It has 1,300 architects (including trainees) among 2,400 employees, and its recent projects range from JPMorgan’s skyscraper on Park Avenue in New York to a new art gallery in Shanghai.

“It started in a bedsit in Hampstead. 16b Hampstead Hill Gardens, first floor,” Foster recalls precisely of Team 4, the firm he co-founded with the late Lord Richard Rogers and others in 1963 before breaking away. Foster + Partners is the largest UK architectural firm and one of the world’s most prestigious, although smaller than global corporate practices such as Gensler and Arcadis.

The Foster practice was driven to expand after finding in the early 1990s that it was overdependent on the UK, which was in a property recession. Having started to work internationally with the Hong Kong head office of HSBC, by 2025 93 per cent of its revenues came from outside the UK. Projects in the Middle East contributed by far the most of any region.

Foster remains executive chair and the firm’s guiding spirit. He is 91 but still energetic and spry, with no intention of retiring although succession is clearly a consideration.

He is confident his practice will endure after he is gone. “Of course there will be differences, but succession has been long planned. There’s an extraordinary depth of talent. It’s like a chamber orchestra. It doesn’t need me as the conductor.”

One of his legacies will be the unusual way Foster + Partners works. The firm is an outlier among architectural practices and other professional services firms in operating globally and on a large range of projects without dividing itself by regions or specialisms. It is arranged in seven studios that work in parallel: the seventh was created this year.

“Anybody can do anything, anywhere, as long as they don’t compete,” Foster summarises. The studios, initially comprising about 60 people each, were formed in 2004 to maintain the creativity of small teams within a large organisation. They also reflect Foster’s nature. “I would go mad having to work just in one place [or] if I had to work on towers, towers, towers . . . that’s ritualistic and bureaucratic and the opposite of what makes us all tick.”

This makes Foster + Partners an interesting place to practise, but it also involves complexity. The studios have their own leadership and pitch individually for new business, although some clients (such as the late Steve Jobs for Apple’s headquarters in California) come directly to Foster. Some projects end up being worked on as joint ventures between studios.

Stuart Latham, managing partner, says any internal tension over who does what is resolved by discussion, although “there is a danger of tripping over ourselves on occasion and sometimes we are not as elegant as we might be”. As the firm has grown, its studios, numbered one to seven, have expanded in size to between 150 and 300 people each.

The closest to an oversight body is a firm-wide design board, chaired by Foster, including full-time members along with the studio heads. But its purpose is architectural rather than managerial. Foster compares its methods to the “jury” tradition of reviews in architectural schools. “You show your work and explain it, and then people start throwing rocks,” says Latham.

Foster has always liked shaking things up. He recalls insisting to the dean of the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where he studied in the early 1960s, that he needed help to design a tower: “I said, ‘I don’t know about tall buildings, I need an engineer.’” Foster + Partners now employs a range of design specialists, including about 370 structural and environmental engineers.

Foster hops around, attaching himself to a variety of projects being worked on by the different studios, currently including an Alpine village regeneration and a planned tower for JPMorgan in London. “The studio system and how you keep it alive is a learning curve . . . like most architects, I’ve had no business training. I’ve learnt it to a degree through trial and error.”

The firm thrives on internal challenge, Foster says. “The organisation is hierarchical in terms of ownership but creatively, it’s a horizontal line. Anybody can come as an intern and say, ‘I think there’s a better idea.’” But his dominance is evident, both in his personal authority and partnership share: Foster and his family hold 9 per cent of the equity, with another third split among 240 partners.

Foster + Partners has been in and out of private equity hands: the UK firm 3i once held a 40 per cent stake but the Foster partners bought this back in 2014.

 Hennick & Co, a Canadian family investment firm, holds a majority stake, which it took in 2021. “It’s essentially a family . . . it has not changed the nature of the practice,” he says of Hennick.

But Hennick’s backing enables Foster + Partners to invest in expansion, including new offices and technology. The firm has been growing briskly: revenue in the year to April 30 2025 reached £571mn from £369mn the previous year and it has recently opened offices in Seoul and Miami. It has also worked on several big projects in the Middle East, including the King Salman international airport in Riyadh.

Foster has used his relationship adroitly with Hennick to reinforce his will. The investor supported him when he wanted to grow further by adding a seventh studio. To his mind, it offered “more succession, more opportunity. I predict, in no time at all, there’ll be an eighth studio”.

Change means upheaval: it has appointed a new studio head and moved the head of another one to a new role, leading research and innovation. Foster says he encountered “entrenched views” among some partners against adding a studio but found “a kindred voice [at] Hennick saying, ‘You’re absolutely right, Norman, we’ve got to work at this together.’”

Growth also helps to keep the firm youthful, one of Foster’s obsessions. “He loves to see a young office. I think he’d be happy if he was the only person here over 40,” Latham observes. Some longer-serving partners have retired and the average age of employees is now 34. About half of its architects are fully qualified, with the rest in the long period of practical training the profession requires.

The founder remains in motion. He is resident in Switzerland but spends a week a month in London and another in Madrid, where he presides over his own foundation. He also crosses the world to the firm’s offices and projects: his last trip took in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai and Baku. Foster is “more active than he has been in ages . . . he is here and he keeps the rest of us on our toes,” Latham says. As he approaches his firm’s 60th anniversary, there is no sign of him letting go.

Unfinished Decolonisation?

 

By U. Dasin

There is a profound insight in the statement attributed to the founding father of Singapore — Lee Kuan Yew — on the transplantation of Western political institutions into societies whose historical evolution had been radically different from that of the West. The West, he understood, had developed its secular institutions over centuries, against the background of its own particular history of individualism, citizenship, class formation and nation-building. Yet, once Western powers had exported those institutions to the rest of the world — often after having first extracted or expropriated its resources — they tended to assume that the institutions themselves were universal and that the societies receiving them would eventually conform to their logic.

Lee Kuan Yew’s point was not that modern institutions were undesirable. It was that institutions do not float free of history. Beneath the apparently rational and universal structures of the modern state remain older loyalties: family, community, ethnicity, religion, language, memory and collective identity. These do not disappear because a constitution is adopted, a parliament established or independence proclaimed. Indeed, when historical identities are suppressed in the name of an abstract universalism, they have a tendency to return in other forms.

Freud’s famous observation about repression has an unexpected political resonance here: what is driven out of consciousness does not necessarily disappear; it returns, displaced and transformed. The same can happen to collective identities. The modern state may declare all citizens equal, but equality proclaimed at the level of political institutions does not automatically dissolve the historical inequalities, memories and communal structures inherited from the past.

There is an additional irony in the history of Western modernity. The language of universal equality arrived relatively late in the story. It emerged after centuries in which European powers had built empires, appropriated territories and resources, and organised populations according to profound hierarchies of race, class and civilisation. For the populations subsequently incorporated into the modern nation-state, therefore, the arrival of the universal language of equality could not simply erase the material and historical differences produced by the preceding order.

This is one reason why the simple transplantation of Western institutions has produced such uneven results. The problem is not necessarily the institutions themselves. It is the assumption that institutions can be detached from the historical and social conditions that produced them.

Mauritius: A different postcolonial reality

Mauritius presents an especially complicated version of this problem because it does not fit neatly into the familiar postcolonial binary of coloniser and indigenous population. There was no indigenous Mauritian population that existed as a coherent national community before colonialism and could subsequently reclaim its sovereignty. Mauritius was instead constituted through successive movements and displacements of people: enslaved Africans and Malagasy, indentured labourers from different parts of India, migrants from China, Europeans and others, all incorporated into a colonial order characterised by profound inequalities of status, wealth and power.

Consequently, Mauritian decolonisation cannot simply mean the restoration of an original identity that colonialism suppressed. There is no single precolonial Mauritian identity waiting to be recovered. The Mauritian historical experience is instead one of multiple populations becoming, over time, a society. This distinction matters enormously for the way we understand the present debate over Kreol.

The Kreol question

The proposal to begin discussing the introduction of Kreol in the National Assembly is, on its face, an eminently defensible democratic proposition. A language spoken extensively in the everyday life of the country should not be treated as inherently inferior simply because the colonial state elevated other languages into formal institutional domains. Indeed, the parliamentary recognition of Kreol can be understood as part of the continuing democratisation of Mauritian public life.

But the question becomes much more complicated if the matter is framed through the familiar binary of colonial language versus indigenous language. Kreol is certainly a language of Mauritius. But the historical meaning of Mauritius cannot be reduced to Kreol, any more than the history of its population can be reduced to a single ethnic experience. This is where the exceptional complexity of the Mauritian case needs to be acknowledged.

What does it mean to speak of an “indigenous” language in a society whose populations were themselves brought together through slavery, indentureship, migration and colonial structures? What happens when the legitimate recognition of one historically marginalised identity is interpreted, consciously or otherwise, as requiring the marginalisation of other historically constituted identities? These are not semantic questions. They go to the heart of nation-building.

A plurality of histories and identities

For the descendants of indentured populations, for example, “Indian” is hardly a sufficient description of the historical inheritance they carry. The linguistic and cultural histories of Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and other communities are distinct. They have generated their own literary, religious, musical and cultural traditions, while simultaneously participating in the making of a distinctly Mauritian society.

This plurality is visible if we care to look: Bihar Diwas, Maharashtra Day, Telugu cultural celebrations and Tamil Heritage celebrations are not simply exercises in religious or folkloric nostalgia. Nor are Cavadee, Holi and Ganesh Chaturthi merely religious festivals in a narrow sense. They are immense collective performances through which language, music, dance, food, dress, ritual, memory and social relations are reproduced and transmitted between generations.

Culture is lived.
It is performed.
It is remembered.

And people understandably become anxious when they believe that the recognition of one identity is being achieved at the expense of another. This is why the distinction between language and ethnicity becomes so important in the Kreol debate. Kreol can be understood as a language, a lingua franca, a literary medium, a language of popular culture and, potentially, a powerful expression of a shared Mauritian inheritance. But none of these propositions automatically makes Kreol the exclusive linguistic expression of Mauritian identity, still less the cultural property of a single community.

Indeed, there is a particularly important distinction to be made between Kreol as a common language of Mauritius and Kreol as an ethnic marker. The former can unite. The latter can divide.

This distinction is especially significant when we recall the work of Dev Virahsawmy, for whom Morisien could signify something larger than the linguistic possession of one community: a collective inheritance produced through the historical encounter of different peoples and languages. In that conception, the language itself becomes evidence of Mauritius’s hybridity. The danger comes when the semantics of language and race are quietly conflated. Once Kreol becomes identified primarily with a particular ethnic community, the very people who might otherwise embrace its wider national significance may begin to fear that they are being asked to exchange one identity for another.

What does decolonisation really mean?

And this brings us to perhaps the most important question of all: what exactly do we mean by decolonisation?

Decolonisation does not end with the lowering of one flag and the raising of another. Independence is a constitutional event. Decolonisation is a much longer historical process. It involves the restructuring of economic power, educational opportunity, cultural prestige, institutional representation, land ownership, social mobility, knowledge systems and the psychological inheritance of colonial hierarchy.

To equate decolonisation primarily with the introduction of Kreol into Parliament would therefore be to reduce an immense historical problem to a single symbolic intervention. The introduction of Kreol may be desirable. But it is not, by itself, decolonisation.

Indeed, there is a danger in allowing symbolic recognition to substitute for structural transformation. This is where Mauritius needs to resist another imported intellectual binary: the assumption that there must be one authentic postcolonial subject — the indigenous, the colonised, the subaltern — and that once that subject has been recognised, the work of decolonisation has been accomplished.

There was never a single Mauritian subaltern

The Mauritian subaltern was never singular. There were — and remain — subalterns, with different histories, languages, religions and memories. Their experiences of colonialism overlapped, but they were not identical.

The indentured labourer from Bihar did not arrive with precisely the same history as the Tamil or Telugu labourer; the enslaved African did not occupy the same position as the Chinese migrant; and none of these histories can simply be collapsed into a single postcolonial identity.

This does not diminish the importance of Kreol. It makes the recognition of Kreol more intellectually demanding. The challenge is to recognise it without requiring anyone else to disappear.

Perhaps this is where Lee Kuan Yew’s insight about ethnicity becomes useful again. His achievement in Singapore was not that he abolished ethnicity. He did something more difficult: he acknowledged ethnicity as a powerful social reality while attempting to prevent ethnicity from becoming the organising principle of the state.

Singapore’s lesson, adapted rather than copied, is therefore not “suppress ethnic identity”. It is almost the opposite: recognise identities fully, while refusing to make any single identity the definition of the nation.

Beyond the hyphen

A Mauritian can be Mauritian-Tamil, Mauritian-Telugu, Mauritian-Marathi, Mauritian-Bihari, Mauritian-Creole, Mauritian-Chinese, Mauritian-Muslim, Mauritian-Hindu, Mauritian-Christian — or simply Mauritian without feeling compelled to specify the second half of the hyphen.

The hyphen need not signify division. It can signify layering.

It can say: I have inherited this history, and I also belong to this nation.

But there is an equally legitimate Mauritian who may not wish to define herself through a hyphen at all. She may inhabit several cultural worlds simultaneously and consider them all part of her inheritance without allowing any one of them to become her political identity. The state must have room for both.

This may be the real challenge before us today: not how to eliminate communal identities, but how to prevent any one of them from claiming exclusive ownership of the national identity.

The answer is therefore neither the old fiction of a completely post-ethnic Mauritius nor the newer temptation to divide the nation into competing claims of historical authenticity. The strongest Mauritian identity may ultimately be the one that does not demand the disappearance of all the others.

Mauritius should not be forced into a binary that was never made for it.

Football and the Reinvention of the Modern Nation

 

Long before the first whistle blew at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, another contest was already underway. It was not a contest for the trophy. It was a contest over identity.

Across Europe and beyond, societies are debating immigration, citizenship, national identity and belonging with an intensity not seen for generations. Elections have been won on these questions. Governments have risen and fallen because of them. Yet for all the speeches, legislation and political rhetoric, perhaps nowhere are these tensions revealed more clearly than on a football pitch.

Football has always been more than a game. It has reflected societies at their most hopeful, their most divided and their most united. For ninety minutes, abstract debates become deeply human. They have a face.

In 2026, that face was Lamine Yamal.

At just nineteen years old, Yamal became one of the defining figures of Spain’s World Cup triumph. His performances captivated audiences around the world, but his significance extended well beyond the football itself. He came to represent a broader conversation about identity, heritage and the evolving meaning of national belonging.

This was never simply the story of one remarkable footballer.

It was the story of a generation.

Nations Change Before Our Definitions Do

International football has long been presented as the purest expression of nationhood. Eleven players. One flag. One anthem. One people.

Reality has always been more complex.

Modern nations are increasingly shaped by citizenship, shared experience and common purpose, alongside the histories and cultures that have always formed part of national identity. A child born and raised in Madrid to Moroccan and Equatorial Guinean parents, educated in Spanish schools and representing Spain throughout his footballing journey is not becoming Spanish. His life has unfolded within Spain’s national story from the very beginning.

The same is true across much of the world. The sons and daughters of families whose histories stretch across continents are contributing to the countries in which they were born and raised, enriching national life while often maintaining deep connections to their family heritage. Football has simply made that reality visible. Yet the sport also reveals a lingering contradiction.

When these players succeed, they are often celebrated as national heroes. When they struggle, questions about identity and belonging can reappear with surprising speed. The standards applied to them are not always the same as those applied to others wearing the same shirt.

Yamal’s story is important not because it is exceptional, but because it is increasingly familiar.

Football Has Become Society’s Mirror

Spain is not alone.

France has wrestled with questions of identity for decades. England has experienced similar debates. Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and many other nations have all seen football become a stage upon which wider conversations about citizenship, migration and belonging are projected.

Supporters may believe they are discussing football. Often, they are discussing something much larger.

The stadium has become one of the few places where millions of people publicly negotiate what a nation looks like, who represents it and how national identity continues to evolve. Football did not create these debates. It simply placed them under the brightest lights in the world.

Identity Is Not a Choice Between Worlds

One of the enduring misconceptions surrounding modern identity is the belief that it must be singular.

As though being proudly Spanish somehow diminishes Equatorial Guinean heritage. As though representing England weakens Jamaican or Nigerian ancestry. As though playing for France somehow erases Senegalese, Algerian or Congolese family histories. Human identity has never worked that way.

People carry multiple identities throughout their lives, national, regional, cultural, linguistic and familial. These identities do not necessarily compete with one another. More often, they coexist. Football has not created these layered identities. It has simply introduced them to billions of viewers.

Virgil Van Dijk representing the Netherlands / Photo: Getty Images

Africa’s Global Generation

Hidden within this story is another one.

For much of modern history, conversations about Africa have too often focused on what the continent lacked, industrial capacity, investment, geopolitical influence or economic opportunity. Football tells a different story.

Across the world’s biggest sporting stage, African heritage has become one of the defining threads of the modern game. Some of its greatest players represent African nations. Others represent European countries, North American teams, South American teams or nations elsewhere, while maintaining family histories that reach back across the African continent.

This is not a story of divided loyalties. It is a story of interconnected histories.

From Madrid to London, Paris to Amsterdam, African heritage has become an integral part of the story many nations now tell about themselves. Not through conquest or empire, but through families, communities, education, culture and talent.

Perhaps this is one of Africa’s quietest contributions to the twenty-first century.

Not one measured through military power or political influence, but through people whose lives increasingly connect continents rather than separate them.

The Future Already Has a Face

Lamine Yamal represents more than extraordinary footballing talent.

He represents a generation growing up in societies that are increasingly interconnected, diverse and confident in carrying more than one inheritance. His story challenges the assumption that nations possess a single face or a single narrative. History suggests they never truly did. Modern life makes that reality impossible to ignore.

The question confronting many societies today is no longer whether people like Lamine Yamal belong.

That question was answered years ago, in classrooms, neighbourhoods, workplaces and communities where lives were built and identities formed.

The real question is whether our understanding of nationhood has evolved quickly enough to recognise the societies we have already become.

Football did not create this reality. It revealed it. When Lamine Yamal pulled on the shirt of Spain, he was not redefining his country. He was revealing it. Perhaps that is what the 2026 FIFA World Cup will ultimately be remembered for.

Not just the nation that lifted the trophy, but the moment the world caught a clearer glimpse of the nations it is becoming. 

For Gen Z brains are the new boobs.The era of dumbing down is over

 

Jess Cartner-Morley

We are living in a period of political anti-intellectualism. But in pop culture, clever is the new cool

At the very moment Trump’s rambling speeches and meme–fied inanity threaten to overwhelm us, fashion, music and film are moving in the opposite direction

Put down your negroni, hang up your Prada handbag and pick up a paperback. Next time someone whips out their phone to take your picture, grab your reading specs, not your lipstick. Smart is the new hot.

Pop stars are launching book clubs – the 1970s had Studio 54, this decade has Dua Lipa’s online literary salon Service95 – or joining Substack, where Charli xcx recently published a 1,800-word essay interrogating why it is that as a pop star “you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid”. The supermodel Kaia Gerber (who is fashion royalty – her mum is Cindy Crawford) passes the time backstage at fashion week reading Didion, Duras and Camus, not Vogue.

Three years ago, we dressed in pink to go to the cinema to watch Barbie; in 2026, the mind-bendingly structured, early-Victorian masterpiece Wuthering Heights is the talk of Hollywood, and Netflix is betting big on Emma Corrin as Elizabeth Bennet in Dolly Alderton’s forthcoming adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Intellect and glamour – which have always sat at separate tables in the high-school canteen of pop culture (you can’t sit with the cool kids if you are a teacher’s pet, everyone knows that) – are flirting hard.

“This is real,” says trend forecaster Lucie Greene. “There is a backlash against visually focused lifestyle content, which has become so co-opted by brands. Gen Z want more. They want knowledge. They want to go deep down the rabbit hole, on podcasts and on Reddit as well as on TikTok and YouTube.” Meet you behind the bike sheds to discuss Walter Benjamin over a cigarette, babe.

Model Kaia Gerber

“Reading is so sexy,” Gerber said in 2024 when she launched her book club, Library Science. (First pick: Martyr!, the poet Kaveh Akbar’s anarchic debut novel about grief, martyrdom and addiction – hardly an easy read.) She’s right, obviously, but this is bigger than books. It is thinking, as well as reading, that is cool again. The novel under the arm is just the lapel pin of the brainiac. When the brilliant British designer Louise Trotter was appointed to the Italian luxury label Bottega Veneta last year, top of her in-tray was to cast models for a new advertising campaign. The beauties she chose? Zadie Smith and the octogenarian sculptor and poet Barbara Chase-Riboud.

If we were dumbing this down, I could say that brains are the new boobs. But dumbing down is so over, so let’s dig a little deeper into how we got to a place where Dua Lipa posts selfies on Instagram reclining in a fancy hotel room in full glam and a cocktail dress, winking to the camera over her copy of Just Kids by Patti Smith, and actor Jacob Elordi is papped in an airport bookshop flicking through playwright Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie with a second paperback conspicuously stuffed in a pocket.

It all started with a Kardashian. Of course it did – say what you like about that family, their cultural instincts are rarely wrong. In 2018, Kim Kardashian announced that she was embarking on the long, unglamorous process of qualifying for the California bar. For two decades the Kardashians have anticipated and shaped what aspiration looks like. Kardashian’s pivot towards legal study was an early experiment in whether intellectual seriousness could be folded into celebrity without destroying its commercial appeal.

A few years later, reading itself began to creep into the frame. In the summer of 2021, the first season of The White Lotus aired. Its young, beautiful characters were rarely without books by the pool. Sydney Sweeney’s Olivia read Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, while Brittany O’Grady’s Paula was shown with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The books functioned as character shorthand, a way of signalling that these generation Z kids had hinterlands, but was also a visual assertion that thought could be televisual. Around the same time, paparazzi shots of models and actors reading (Kendall Jenner photographed with a paperback on a yacht in 2019; Emily Ratajkowski reading Joan Didion in bed in 2020) became minor viral events, with the text in their hands scrutinised as closely as their clothes.

Singer-songwriter FKA twigs 

Kendall Jenner 

Ratajkowski’s visibility in this space presented a particular challenge to the status quo, because she is not just pretty, she is hot. And here she was, publishing essays, giving interviews about feminism and power, and, in 2021, releasing My Body, a bestselling collection that insisted that a woman could be a serious writer without backing down on the day job of being a sex symbol. There were echoes of this mind-bend in 2025 when the avant-garde pop star FKA twigs, once notorious for her athletic pole‑dancing skills, delivered a keynote address at the British Library, explicitly calling out what she described as the “dumbing down” of public life. “Where are the thinkers?” she asked, demanding intellect as a civic right, a utility, a public service.

This is a very strange moment for smart to get hot. We are living through a period of pronounced anti‑intellectualism. Expertise is dismissed as elitism, procedure as dull, facts as irrelevant. Trump’s rambling, repetitive speeches have warped public discourse worldwide. The political motivations are clear, since anti-intellectualism has always been foundational to authoritarianism, depriving the people of the framework with which to question power (no need to remind anyone who burned the books). In the US, elite universities are being defunded, investigative newspapers such as the Washington Post depleted and defanged. Everywhere, we are being dumbed down for profit by an addictive social media, which turns us all into remote-working battery chickens of the attention farms of Silicon Valley. We feel powerless in the face of this, and our acceptance of it is insidious: in the modern phrase, “It’s not that deep”, and in the casual they’re-all-as-bad-as-each-other disengagement that is undermining democracy.

And yet, at the very moment meme-fied inanity threatens to overwhelm us, some threads of popular culture are moving in the opposite direction. The contrasts can be jarring. Last September, during the week that Trump called climate change “the greatest con job” during a speech to the UN, the New York catwalk shows were taking place. At Proenza Schouler, the show notes came footnoted with a reading list of French feminist writings, including The Third Body by Hélène Cixous and Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray, while Joseph Altuzarra left a copy of The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa on every seat. One day in January, I read a news report about Trump confusing Greenland with Iceland four times in one speech, and then toggled to Vogue to read about the latest Saint Laurent menswear show, which was inspired by designer Anthony Vaccarello’s reading of James Baldwin’s seminal 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room.

Did you raise an eyebrow at the back there? It is worth interrogating the scepticism that creeps in any time fashion or glamour are put in the same category as thought or intellect. I refer you here to Dua Lipa’s author interviews, which are superb. In a chat with David Szalay, the author of Flesh, she asked him about the authorial decision to omit the protagonist’s father from a story that has so much to say about masculinity – a point that, Szalay notes, no reviewers had picked up on.

Rock’n’roll may have long set itself in opposition to being square, but the history of pop lyrics debunks the idea that pop stars are stupid. “Celebrities get called stupid if they don’t read, and stupid when they do,” says Hali Brown, the 30-year-old co-founder of BookTok’s @booksonthebedside. “So I don’t really know what people want them to do.” She has no time for the pearl‑clutching over “performative reading”. “Young people are definitely not divested from celebrity culture. If this makes people feel better about reading out and about, that’s good, right?” As Greene points out, “Creatives have always had a close and thoughtful sense of the zeitgeist. Eloquence is part of being a cultural leader.”

It’s complicated. Generation Z are, as Greene puts it, “totally paradoxical, just generally. Worried they spend too much time online, yet spending a huge amount of time online. Worried about the environment, yet Shein’s biggest audience.” It is certainly not as simple as people reading more. The cultural heat runs counter to the general direction of travel. Long-term studies show sustained declines in reading across much of the anglophone world. In the UK, a survey by the charity the Reading Agency found that leisure reading among adults has fallen steadily over the past decade; in the US, the National Endowment for the Arts has reported a sharp drop in literary reading since the early 2000s; in Australia, similar trends show fewer adults reading books regularly, particularly men.

Faced with this decline, the book industry is using fashion as a lever with which to exert counter-pressure. James Daunt, the managing director of Waterstones, Britain’s largest bookstore chain, has spoken about the growth of print book sales among younger readers. Literary fiction and classic novels, in particular, are seeing renewed interest from under-35s. Booksellers report that many customers arrive already primed by social media. They know the covers of novels they have seen referenced online, even if they are not yet sure what they are about. As one London-based bookseller says: “Covers matter enormously, but so does the idea that reading is part of who you are, not just something you do alone.”

And so reading is more visible than it has been in years. You have already seen the books. The blue-and-white covers of Fitzcarraldo Editions peeking out of tote bags. Dog-eared copies of Wuthering Heights on the train, sudden ubiquity lending it the air of a seasonal accessory. Book clubs have proliferated, hosted in bars or online spaces, with discussion as much about identity and feeling as it is about plot. Alongside this sits BookTok, the sprawling corner of TikTok where users, many of them in their teens and early 20s, recommend novels, cry on camera about fictional deaths, annotate favourite passages and turn backlist titles into surprise bestsellers. In a culture saturated with surfaces, the book becomes proof, if not of depth, then at least of the desire for it.

Across the UK, booksellers describe younger customers who are less interested in genres than in signals: what a book says about them, how it looks on a table, how it fits into a life. At BookBar, the London hybrid bookshop and wine bar (with one branch in Islington and another in Chelsea), the founder, Chrissy Ryan, has spoken about how reading has become social again – performative, or just communal, depending on how you look at it. Events sell out quickly. “People want to talk about what they’re reading,” notes Ryan. “They want it to be part of their social life.”

In an age of short attention spans, “not being a slave to your phone is kind of seen as a flex”, says Brown. Recently, she stopped using Spotify and has started listening to the iPod she had when she was 10. “People are realising that their best ideas come from times where they’re engaging with a world beyond short-form content.”

The publishing industry has pounced on an opportunity, inviting figures from outside its traditional gatekeeping structures into positions of authority. Sarah Jessica Parker recently served as a judge for the Booker prize, her presence aiming to signal not dilution but reach. Pandora Sykes is the author of Books and Bits, the most popular UK books newsletter on Substack, with more than 100,000 readers. Before she was a literary tastemaker, she was a front row fixture as a newspaper fashion editor. “There really didn’t seem to be a credible way in which I could be attending fashion shows and being photographed in some zany get-up, while also writing book reviews or interviewing authors,” she says. “I had to pick my poison, and it really did feel that binary: it took ages for people to take me seriously in the culture space, so I really limited the fashion side.” But Sykes’ eye for the zeitgeist and sense of style are compelling for readers for whom a love of books sits alongside less highbrow interests. “Most of us aren’t exclusively readers, or fashion plates. And I don’t think it’s something we apply to men, the idea that everyone who likes books is austere and highfalutin and couldn’t possibly enjoy the lowbrow, or the ornamental. She can, she does, she will again!”

Note the character arc of the book bag. What began with the quietly earnest Daunt Books tote and the New Yorker canvas bag has become a high-fashion money spinner. This season’s must-have Dior handbags are emblazoned not with logos but with titles: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Madame Bovary, Les Fleurs du Mal. Literature is lifestyle, knowledge is brand. There is something undoubtedly troubling about this pricing of intellectual aspiration – particularly, in the case of the Dior bag, at around £2,400 – but it would be naive to ignore that books have always been aesthetic objects. Home libraries were status symbols long before Instagram; the orange spine of Penguin classics is as recognisable as any designer monogram. The book cover as design object is nothing new: Francis Cugat’s 1925 illustration for the first edition of The Great Gatsby, spectral eyes over blazing cityscape, a fever dream of hedonism and melancholy, is a design classic. In 2024, a signed first edition of it sold for $425,000 at Heritage Auctions, according to the Artnet Price Database.

Any attempt to reduce this to books versus phones will gain you a B-minus at best. Genuine skill and knowledge are also becoming more prized “in online content and within commerce”, says Greene. “Look at the emphasis on athletes, footballers, hockey players and pro skaters as the new fashion and luxury influencers and partners. Culture is looking to people with genuine skill.”

Instagram, once the engine of aspiration, is losing ground to Substack, where depth, voice and argument are given a modern spin, with thinking monetised as expertise plus personality. Podcasts, too, bring long‑form thinking into culture’s fluffier regions. Bella Freud’s long-running podcast, Fashion Neurosis, treats fashion as a route into biography, memory and theory, with recent interviewees including Debbie Harry, Christy Turlington and Annie Leibovitz.

But is smart really the new hot, or is smart only the new hot if you are also hot? Are we just turning this into yet another aspect of life where only pretty people count? As so often, the patriarchy has a lot to answer for here. Intelligence is newsworthy in attractive women, because brains and beauty have for so long been cast as opposing traits. The clever woman was frumpy, unfeminine, difficult. The beauty‑brains binary, which served the patriarchy well, has been internalised. If there is something slightly irritating about watching the already glamorous add intellectual credibility to their portfolios – and we may as well own it – there is also something quietly radical in the refusal to dim one quality in order to legitimise another. The age‑old demand that women choose one identity or the other is being challenged. UK publishers, notably, report that the most engaged reading communities skew young and female. Reading groups, live events and book clubs are dominated by women in their 20s and 30s. It’s interesting that the two major book-to-screen adaptations of this year – Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice – are of novels beloved by female readers.

Where is politics in all this? It used to be the way for young people to engage with the world of ideas. They gathered to talk about revolution, not 19th-century fiction. But with politics now a war zone, who can blame the youth for tapping out? With an assertive strain of modern conservatism consolidating power in the US, and overt political expression becoming more risky, education offers a way of remaining intellectually active without stepping into the blood and gore of the culture‑war colosseum. In a fractious and even dangerous world, reading, quoting and learning are ways to signal seriousness and curiosity without inviting backlash. As political discourse grows coarser, culture finds new places to store complexity.

“Some of this is about expanding what it means to be smart,” says Brown. “There are lots of people who think Trump is smart because he’s a businessman, or that manosphere podcasters are smart because they use scientific words and for some reason always speak really fast. But intellect is more niche. This is about people who want to reflect on the world not just because they want to conquer it or make money. The online reading community is a place where we can talk about things like the patriarchy in an accessible way, through the lens of stories and characters, and I think that can feel healthier.”

With humanities degrees under threat, education takes on the texture of luxury. On TikTok, being “disgustingly educated” is, for want of a better word, the hot new aesthetic. And AI, as ever, is part of the picture. For centuries, we have exercised our brains in our jobs, but if the robots are coming for the jobs, perhaps it is logical that we reclaim our brains for our own use. “And it’s also about trying to make sense of the crazy world we’re living in,” says Greene. “A bit like how Victorians were obsessed with ancient history to make sense of the unprecedented cultural, economic and societal change they were going through.”

Being smart is sexy now. Not only the kind of sexy that makes people fancy you, but the kind of sexy that generates discourse. The kind of sexy that accrues value. The flipside of a dumbed-down world is that thought has scarcity value, and what is rare has always been hyped. Knowing stuff is to the 2020s what limited-edition trainers were to the 2000s. Does that make sense? Whatever. It sounds cool, and that’s what counts.

Slaves in the Islamic world have often found opportunities for social and financial advancement

 

Up to 17 million people have passed through the slave trade in the Muslim world since the 7th century. Tragically, the practice lives on

I began my research into the history of slavery in the Islamic world in Bamako, the capital of Mali, in 2020. Yes, you read that right. Not 1820 or 1920, but five years ago, during a harrowing encounter. Sitting cross-legged on the mud floor of a temporary shelter, a man in his late 50s called Hamey told me how he and his ancestors had been enslaved to a slave-owning family in the western region of Kayes for many generations. It was only two years earlier, after a savage public beating, that he’d managed to escape his enslavement. He broke down repeatedly as he described the near-impossibility, now that he was free, of finding somewhere to live and providing for his family in one of the poorest countries on earth.

Slavery is officially illegal in Mali, but it continues, a hereditary and racialised system, as it does in Mauritania and other parts of west Africa. Nor is the problem unique to the region. In recent years, the Arab world, especially the Gulf, has become a hub of modern slavery – defined by Walk Free, the international human rights and anti-slavery group, as “situations of exploitation in which a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuse of power”.

In its most recent report, from 2023, Walk Free’s Global Slavery Index reported that Arab states have the world’s highest prevalence of slaves (10.1 per 1,000 people), ahead of Asia and the Pacific (6.8), Europe and Central Asia (6.6) and Africa (5.2). The countries in the region with the highest numbers of people trapped in modern slavery were Saudi Arabia (740,000), Iraq (221,000), Yemen (180,000) and Syria (153,000).

The history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world is as long as the history of Islam. Whereas the notorious Atlantic slave trade lasted from the 15th to the 19th centuries and enslaved 11-14 million Africans, the slave trade practised within the geographical heart of the Muslim world, centred on North Africa and the Middle East, lasted from the seventh century until the 20th and enslaved 12-15 million, perhaps even 17 million. Vast numbers of men, women and children were taken overwhelmingly from sub-Saharan Africa, together with Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus during the Ottoman period. More covertly and in much smaller numbers, slavery – if not institutionalised trafficking – continues today.

But Islam did not conceive slavery in the Middle East, any more than Christianity devised it on the shores of the Atlantic. (It is just as wrong to call this phenomenon “the Muslim slave trade” or “Islamic slave trade” as it would be to call its Atlantic version “the Christian slave trade”.) Seventh-century Arab Muslims, already surrounded by the ancient slaving civilisations of the Persians and Byzantines, inherited the tradition of slavery from their pagan ancestors and refined and adapted it in an Islamic context. Islam permitted slavery from the outset and with their range of regulations, and rights afforded to slaves, the Quran and Islamic jurisprudence combined to improve the lot of the average slave.

My new book Captives and Companions, the first history of its kind for the general reader, is the result of years of research and travel in the Muslim world. Here are the stories of eighth-century concubines, ninth-century plantation slave revolts, 13th-century slave soldiers who founded mighty dynasties ruling Egypt, Syria and Iraq, and generations of Christian boys “harvested” annually from the Balkans to become the Ottoman Empire’s crack soldiers – the Janissaries. Eighteenth-century Muslim and Christian corsairs marauding across the Mediterranean rub shoulders with 19th-century Ottoman eunuch millionaires, downtrodden Egyptian cotton-pickers and enslaved Africans labouring on Zanzibari clove plantations. There are disturbing accounts of 20th-century pearl divers, date palm cultivators in the Gulf, and Yazidi women serially raped in the recent terrorist “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq.

On the other hand, it may surprise you to know that slaves in the Islamic world have often found opportunities for social and financial advancement. From the earliest days of Islam, enslaved men – and in some cases women – could rise to the heights of society. Take Bilal ibn Rabah, an Ethiopian slave who became one of the prophet Mohammed’s most cherished “companions” (disciples and followers), and earned the exceptional distinction of becoming Islam’s first muaddin, or caller to prayer. Famous eunuchs and concubines could become the richest men and women of their day.

Eunuchs represented one of the Islamic world’s longest-lasting categories of enslavement. Mohammed himself was given Mabur, a eunuch, by the Byzantine ruler of Egypt in 627. Although castration is prohibited by Islam, for centuries leaders across the Islamic world looked the other way and imported enormous numbers of mutilated boys. Nineteenth-century descriptions of castration, provided by Western travellers, are not for the faint-hearted. Boys were shackled to a table, wrote Raoul du Bisson, a Frenchman who watched Christian monks perform the operation in Ethiopia in the 1860s. “The operator then seizes the little penis and scrotum and with one sweep of a sharp razor removes all the appendages.” Styptic substances used to cauterise the wound around the urethra included hot oil, dust or tar, honey, butter and mule dung. Mortality rates appear to have been one in three.

Concubines, too, have endured for virtually the entire lifespan of the Islamic world and, unlike eunuchs, were not prohibited. Mohammed was given Mariyya in 627, and had several others. Women captured during the world-changing Arab Conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries were routinely enslaved as concubines. The Abbasid caliph Mutawakkil, leader of the Islamic world from 847–861, had 4,000 of them, as did Muqtadir, one of his 10th-century successors. Al Aziz, the Fatimid caliph of Cairo from 975-996, kept 10,000 concubines and eunuchs combined. In some cases, the voices of these courageous and charismatic women have been preserved. Arib, a concubine from 9th-century Baghdad, admitted to having slept with eight caliphs. Asked what she looked for in sex, she replied: “A hard p---k and sweet breath.”

Abolition came late in the Islamic world. Though many indigenous voices called for it in the 19th and 20th centuries, including Mohammed Abduh, Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the Indian philosopher, and Rashid Rida, the anti-Western Islamic revivalist, they did not amount to a movement. Ultimately, it was global economic forces and international political pressure, often led by the British, to combine and bring slavery to a stuttering close. (For all the reformist zeal of the Young Turks, slavery – as opposed to the slave trade – hadn’t been abolished in the Ottoman Empire before its fall in 1922.)

What is remarkable today is how one version of slavery and the slave trade continues to dominate Western public consciousness. To take just one example, A Short History of Slavery, by the historian James Walvin, was published in 2007. Of the book’s 235 pages, 201 focus on the Americas.

By contrast, the history of slavery in the Islamic world – so long, various and controversial – has been neglected. That is starting to change: a new generation of Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian and (in particular) Turkish researchers are poring over the archives and asking uncomfortable questions. Among other things, their work will demonstrate that, although it has become fashionable in some quarters to vilify the West as the supreme historical villain, such a stance is historically and factually incorrect.

My final confrontation with modern slavery came last year in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. Here I met a woman in her fifties called Habi. She had, like Hamey in Bamako, managed to escape a life of slavery. Regularly beaten and repeatedly raped as a child by her ‘master’, she came, again like Hamey, from a long line of enslaved men and women, and – having been rescued by her brother in 2008 – was now living free, but in destitution. Home was a small, breeze-block shelter, buried in deep drifts of sand, in the outer reaches of a poverty-stricken settlement, under a scorching sun.

But Habi struck a note of defiance. She said it was only when she came to Nouakchott as a free woman that she realised she’d never really lived. “Before that, I was just an object,” she told me. “I didn’t exist as a human being. Now, praise God, I am free.” She has stood for the Mauritanian parliament twice, and has dedicated the rest of her life to fighting slavery. It’s both tragic and disconcerting that, in 2025, such a fight goes on.