Breana Newton, a legal coordinator in Princeton, New Jersey, who regularly posts about books on TikTok, was one of the people who responded to Ms. Blalock's video. “I'm going to show you the richness of the shelves,” Newton, 33, says in her own video. “Ready?”
He then gives viewers a brief tour of his house, showing books everywhere: on shelves, in overflowing piles here and there, and scattered on the bed. There's no sense that the rooms have been staged or that the books have been purchased with how they would look on Instagram.
In an interview, Newton said he was concerned that trends like shelf wealth would encourage overconsumption. This year, he added, he is trying not to buy any new books.
Another critic of the trend, Keila Tirado-Leist, said in a reaction video: “Who benefits from having to constantly name, rate, and bestow wealth on any type of home decor style or aesthetic?”
Tirado-Leist, a lifestyle content creator in Madison, Wisconsin, compared shelf wealth to “quiet luxury” and “stealth wealth,” styles that have recently been making waves on social media.
Still, I understood that what drives a home decor trend like this is the desire to create a home that feels, well, homey. In another video, she described the idea of layering—acquiring pieces little by little and arriving at a finished look—rather than trying to buy a bunch of things at once in an effort to follow a trend.
“Designing a house takes time,” Tirado-Leist said.
Another TikTok user put it more bluntly in response to Ms. Blalock's video: “Shelf wealth doesn't mean you have books. It means you have built-in elements.”
