Do You Have ‘Bookshelf Wealth’?

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 am going to show you bookshelf wealth,” Ms. Newton, 33, says in a video of her personal. “Ready?”

She then provides viewers a quick tour of her dwelling, displaying 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 developments like bookshelf wealth encourage overconsumption. This 12 months, she added, she is making an attempt 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 lifestyle content material creator in Madison, Wis., likened bookshelf wealth to “quiet luxury” and “stealth wealth,” types which have just 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, properly, homey. In one other video, she described the thought of layering — that’s, slowly buying items and constructing as much as a completed look, quite than making an attempt to purchase a bunch of issues suddenly in an effort to chase a pattern.

“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.”