Almost 100 percent of the innumerable “celebrity home tours” you’ll find on the internet are an exercise in (now totally endemic) décor gaslighting, where professionally molded and anally styled homes are passed off as hyperpersonal, and where even sentimental objects are acquired by outsourcing. Our guides LOVE to celebrate the veil, way too often joking to camera, “Oh, I wasn’t expecting you!” (They had been, of course, for years.) Julia Fox, “It” girl and memoirist, thankfully provides a much-needed tonic in her highly watchable anti–Architectural Digest, self-produced three-minute TikTok home tour. She abandons the toxicity of “curation” in favor of mess and chaos: The apartment is squeezed; she sleeps in the living room; everything is cheap; plants are dead, but infesting mice are alive.
She is not oblivious to how this might look. Vast homes, in this economy, are “ick.” Hers is the only tour that is instead about the viewer, who is made to think, in Fox’s words, “OK, maybe I’m not doing so bad.”