Breana Newton, a authorized coordinator in Princeton, N.J., who posts repeatedly 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 provides viewers a short tour of her residence, displaying books all over the 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 had been purchased with the consideration of how they might look on Instagram.
In an interview, Ms. Newton mentioned that she frightened traits like bookshelf wealth encourage overconsumption. This yr, she added, she is attempting to not purchase any new books.
Another critic of the development, 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,” types which have lately made social media waves.
Still, she was understanding that what drives a home-décor development like this one is a want to create a house that feels, effectively, homey. In one other video, she described the concept 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 home takes time,” Ms. Tirado-Leist mentioned.
Another TikTok person 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.”