Breana Newton, a authorized coordinator in Princeton, N.J., who posts commonly about books on TikTok, was one of many individuals who responded to Ms. Blalock’s video. “I’m going to indicate 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 all places — 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 had been purchased with the consideration of how they’d look on Instagram.
In an interview, Ms. Newton stated that she anxious tendencies like bookshelf wealth encourage overconsumption. This yr, she added, she is attempting to not purchase any new books.
One other critic of the development, Keila Tirado-Leist, stated in a response video: “Who does it profit to continually have to call and qualify and connect 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 development like this one is a need to create a house that feels, effectively, homey. In one other video, she described the thought of layering — that’s, slowly buying items and constructing as much as a completed look, slightly than attempting to purchase a bunch of issues suddenly in an effort to chase a development.
“Styling a house takes time,” Ms. Tirado-Leist stated.
One other TikTok person put it extra bluntly in a response to Ms. Blalock’s video: “Bookshelf wealth doesn’t imply you’ve books. It means you’ve built-ins.”
