Do You Have ‘Bookshelf Wealth’?

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’m going to point out you bookshelf wealth,” Ms. Newton, 33, says in a video of her personal. “Prepared?”

She then offers viewers a quick tour of her house, exhibiting 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 have been purchased with the consideration of how they might look on Instagram.

In an interview, Ms. Newton stated that she fearful developments like bookshelf wealth encourage overconsumption. This 12 months, she added, she is making an attempt to not purchase any new books.

One other critic of the pattern, Keila Tirado-Leist, stated in a response video: “Who does it profit to continuously have to call and qualify and connect wealth to any form of model 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 just lately 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 thought of layering — that’s, slowly buying items and constructing as much as a completed look, fairly than making an attempt to purchase a bunch of issues suddenly in an effort to chase a pattern.

“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 might have books. It means you might have built-ins.”