Breana Newton, a authorized coordinator in Princeton, N.J., who posts often about books on TikTok, was one of many individuals who responded to Ms. Blalock’s video. “I am going to show you bookshelf wealth,” Ms. Newton, 33, says in a video of her personal. “Ready?”
She then offers viewers a quick tour of her dwelling, 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 anxious traits like bookshelf wealth encourage overconsumption. This yr, she added, she is attempting to not purchase any new books.
Another critic of the pattern, Keila Tirado-Leist, mentioned in a response video: “Who does it benefit to constantly have to name and qualify and attach wealth to any kind of style or home-décor aesthetic?”
Ms. Tirado-Leist, a way of life content material creator in Madison, Wis., likened bookshelf wealth to “quiet luxury” and “stealth wealth,” kinds which have lately made social media waves.
Still, she was understanding that what drives a home-décor pattern like this one is a want to create a house that feels, nicely, homey. In one other video, she described the concept of layering — that’s, slowly buying items and constructing as much as a completed look, fairly than attempting to purchase a bunch of issues in an effort to chase a pattern.
“Styling a home takes time,” Ms. Tirado-Leist mentioned.
Another TikTok consumer put it extra bluntly in a response to Ms. Blalock’s video: “Bookshelf wealth does not mean you have books. It means you have built-ins.”