On an affectless, sunny day in 2022, High School Musical alumnus Ashley Tisdale, retinol-ed to a shine, welcomed a videographer from Architectural Digest into Casa De French, her unfortunately named Hollywood home. Tisdale, a decade and a pregnancy removed from her last serious role – a critically ignored arc as a prostitute on Sons of Anarchy – wore a simple white tee and high-waisted khakis tailored well enough to change the vibe at a potluck.
She introduced the camera to her Apparatus coffee table (inspired by “the dialogue of ceremonial and domestic ritual”), her $1,000-per-square-foot Maghreban rug, and her living room chairs, californicated wicker callbacks to the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition’s German pavilion. Then she broke an unwritten rule. She let slip that her built-in bookshelf had been empty a few days earlier.
“These bookshelves, I have to be honest, did not have books in it a couple of days ago,” she giggled in a voice still upholstered in the nasal pleather of her native New Jersey. “I had my husband go to a bookstore. I was like… ‘You need to get 400 books.’ Obviously, my husband is like… ‘We should be collecting books over time and like putting them on the shelves.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no. Not when AD comes.”
She winced, then smiled. She knew what she’d done. The AD team snipped the awkward pause that followed in post-production, but kept the comment in. They wanted engagement and they got it. Hours after her video went live she was being mocked on Page Six. After that came the pile-on: People, Buzzfeed, Perez Hilton, and, for some reason, Business Insider. She was accused of being a fake and a phony – everything short of stolen valour. The comments sections were merciless.
***
A half-century earlier, an ostentatiously handsome sociologist named Pierre was sitting near the banks of the Seine eyebanging future MSNBC moms, and considering why surround ourselves with – among other things – books . He jotted down an unwieldy phrase: “Embodied history, internalized as second nature.” It was an attempt to describe why humans do the things they do: Why his father contented himself with a postal route in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department. Why American girls wore Levis. Why he chain-smoked Gauloises.
Professor Bourdieu suspected that these kinds of choices were all correlated and no less profound for being – in many if not most cases – kneejerk. He intended to prove it. He spent the next few years questioning his countrymen about their likes, their dislikes, their choices, their furniture, as well as the contents and sizes of their libraries. He ran his fingers over the French body politic. He wanted to know what tickled.
Everything.
Bourdieu found that personal, professional, and consumer choices were not just correlated, but clustered. The sons and daughters of senior executives tended to be knowledgeable about classical music, favor Spanish painters, and engage in more social activities than he sons and daughters of less successful professionals, who were more likely to spend time shopping, admire the impressionists, and exhibit an obligatory friendliness that rarely led to real friendship. He sketched a scatterplot that laid bare French society’s most sensitive spots, a sybaritic society rendered in the nude. His connect-the-dot odalisque made class warriors stand at attention and it made Bourdieu famous. He wore a lot of turtlenecks on talk shows as a generation of students at the Sorbonne struggled through his books, each as alluring as the terms and conditions for an air conditioner unit.
Then, in 2002, he did what people who chain-smoke Gauloises do. He died of lung cancer.
But Bourdieu’s work didn’t stop; he had a maison worth of apprentices he’d trained to be exacting in their measurements. They carried on his work in their own countries, disrobing their own cultures and sneakily fondling their datasets. In America, Will Atkinson produced a scatterplot of his own. It showed that Americans with more than 500 books liked theater and had seven or more “favorite artists” they could actually name. It showed that Americans with fewer than 200 books thought of themselves trendier than the first group, but could only name five artists. He found that many of the folks in the second group made more than the folks in the first and that the folks in the first group didn’t seem to mind that.
After all, they had more refined taste. And, of course, the tote bags to prove it.
The Boat and Tote, a $35 canvas ice carrier, was first sold by Leon Leonwood Bean in 1944. Blatzell’s blue-blooded doubles partners with 5,000-square-foot cottages on the coast of Maine pulled them off the shelves of L.L.’s Bean’s Freeport outdoor shop and carried them down their docks to waiting sloops. The bags – as well as the boots just down the aisle – quickly became part of WASP iconography, the wingdings of the Mayflower-ed. Then, in 1970, Love Story, a jokeless romantic comedy starring Ryan O’Neal (who looked suspiciously like Edward Digby Baltzell) as Harvard undergrad Oliver Barrett IV and Ali McGraw as his Wellesley sweetheart, grossed $2,463,916 opening weekend, a record at the time. WASP-derived “Ivy Style” became de rigeur for college-bound boomers fleeing their parents’ middle-class homes and sensibilities. Many an English major from Kalamazoo carried Thus Spoke Zarasthustra to class in a Boat and Tote – less sullied than the salt-stained ones bandied about by the legacy admits, but close enough.
The bag was just the start. After the totes, it was frayed Persian rugs, Eames chairs, Herman Miller chairs, Shaker chairs, barn-door tables with leafy Bordallo Pinheiro dishes on top, baby grand pianos, baby music classes, tennis bracelets, tennis rackets, änglaspels, apothecary jars, framed diplomas, frayed passports, Top Siders, Patricia Highsmith mysteries, spode dishes, Crabtree & Evelyn soap, ballet flats…. And after all that, it was a place to put it – the slowly settling homes in the right suburbs, where their little Olivias and Olivers could be acculturated in their own right, learning to covet bell jars, horsebit loafers, postcards from Tulum, adult Legos, Rabbit corkscrews, Rabbit vibrators, antique pearl necklaces, flash tattoos, smart home devices, gassed-out SodaStreams, Saul Steinberg posters, Patagonia vests, soccer trophies, unused degrees, heavily used MacBooks, and unread Didion books.
These people weren’t WASPs, but they buzzed around the same goldenrod. And they bought a lot of books.
***
Tisdale, the daughter of a New Jersey contractor, may not have read Bourdie (or owned his books), but she instinctively understood his work – all those correlated tastes. Her confession was nothing if not a self-effacing nod to her own “embodied history, internalized as second nature.” But it was at odds with the bookshelf. There was a class inconsistency. That sort of things bothers people. They’re suspicious of anyone who makes the private sin of caring.
Still, the insults lobbed at Tisdale didn’t stick – not to her and not to her boucle air chairs. Instead, they served as publicity for the small but growing design business she’d founded with her father. Since the AD video, Tisdale has collaborated with Rugs USA on a burnt pastel maru spread and Canopy humidifiers on a “cashmere vanilla” scent. She has sold shea butter and jojoba radiance and lavender cloud face masks at Target. Those brands have sought her out or stocked her not because she is – or will ever be – an arbiter of good taste, but because she is an avatar of a massive and growing demographic: People committing the public sin of trying.
In 2022, Tisdale sold Casa de French for $5.9 million and moved to a midcentury modern in Nichols Canyon. Like the old house, the new one had built-in book shelves, golden maple insets straining straining in her Insta posts under the weight of a growing collection. On the front hall table, a stack of books. On the console, another stack. On the floor, another.
She learned. She found her her spot on the scatterplot. She settled down. She settled in.
