Dua Lipa’s Literature Festival style: Chanel red knit by day, Prada by night

Call it literary chic: the books are curated, and so are the clothes. Dua Lipa’s literary credentials were already on the record through her Service95 Book Club. This weekend she took them onstage at the Southbank Centre, curating a run of conversations for London’s Literature Festival, and her wardrobe turned out to be as carefully considered as her reading list.

On Saturday, Lipa hosted two heavyweights at the Royal Festival Hall: Zadie Smith, for a conversation about her huge 2000 debut White Teeth, and Mustafa, the Sudanese Canadian poet and musician whose 2025 collection Nour explores love, grief, faith and devotion. Two different conversations meant two different outfits.

For Smith, Lipa stayed loyal to Chanel, choosing a tomato-red knitted dress from the label’s fall 2026 collection, with a dropped waist and fluffy embellishments at the elbows and hips. She skipped the softer runway styling and toughened the silhouette with towering lace-up black leather knee-high boots by Le Silla, slicked-back dark hair and sculptural red earrings. Smith matched the moment in a draped black sleeveless top pinned with a brooch, oat-colored corduroy pants and patent black heels.

A Prada pivot for the evening

For her conversation with Mustafa, Lipa switched to Prada: a black Re-Nylon tank top with flashes of hot-pink bra straps at the shoulders, a matching pencil skirt, and embroidered daisy socks pulled to the calf, finished with white satin pumps trimmed in wispy feathers. It was a full tonal reset from Chanel’s tomato red to Prada’s black Re-Nylon. Oversized hoop earrings, a slicked-back bun and dark manicured nails completed the look.

Lipa has been leaning into fall more broadly, too. In recent weeks she’s been spotted with husband Callum Turner in a sage-green Phoebe Philo trench on a dog walk, and in a fluffy Charlotte Simone Lila jacket with jeans and chunky Chrome Hearts boots for a studio session in New York. Off-duty she’s bundled up; onstage and in the spotlight, she’s still experimenting.

Patti Smith is next on Lipa’s literary agenda today, so the fashionable book tour isn’t over yet.