Breana Newton, a authorized coordinator in Princeton, N.J., who posts usually about books on TikTok, was one of many individuals who responded to Ms. Blalock’s video. “I’m going to point out you bookshelf wealth,” Ms. Newton, 33, says in a video of her personal. “Prepared?”
She then provides viewers a short tour of her house, exhibiting books in every single place — on cabinets, in overflow piles right here and there, and strewed throughout the mattress. Absent is the sense that the rooms have been staged, or that the books have been purchased with the consideration of how they’d look on Instagram.
In an interview, Ms. Newton mentioned that she fearful developments like bookshelf wealth encourage overconsumption. This 12 months, she added, she is attempting to not purchase any new books.
One other critic of the pattern, Keila Tirado-Leist, mentioned in a response video: “Who does it profit to always have to call and qualify and fasten wealth to any form of fashion or home-décor aesthetic?”
Ms. Tirado-Leist, a way of life content material creator in Madison, Wis., likened bookshelf wealth to “quiet luxurious” and “stealth wealth,” types which have not too long ago made social media waves.
Nonetheless, she was understanding that what drives a home-décor pattern like this one is a need to create a house that feels, properly, homey. In one other video, she described the concept of layering — that’s, slowly buying items and constructing as much as a completed look, moderately than attempting to purchase a bunch of issues suddenly in an effort to chase a pattern.
“Styling a house takes time,” Ms. Tirado-Leist mentioned.
One other TikTok person put it extra bluntly in a response to Ms. Blalock’s video: “Bookshelf wealth doesn’t imply you could have books. It means you could have built-ins.”
