Surface Tension: which image captures the current cultural mood? In a new column for AnOthermag.com, writer and Nymphet Alumni podcast host Biz Sherbert takes an image – from art, the internet, or her camera roll – and probes beyond its surface, exploring what it says about our current cultural and political moment.
Eileen Kelly has always had a nice apartment. At least it looked that way in pictures: a big New York one-bedroom (or two?) with white brick walls and a closet that was also a room. She lived alone, of course, but with a fluffy cat who seemed to be treated like a human (Chi Chi was the star of her Instagram Stories and the subject of at least one post about the power of taking care of a pet). It was just Instagram, but you could tell it was real life too. Eileen wasn’t the kind of girl who would fake having nice things.
So it wasn’t that surprising when she announced that after over a decade in New York City, she was moving to a big pink house in Los Angeles. Who else was going to do it?
Shortly after sharing this news, Kelly directed her 380,000 followers to a private Instagram account, @slipperspinkhome, where she said she would be documenting the rehaul of her new home, a 1926 Spanish Colonial Revival. Like all good property in a certain tax bracket, the house has a name: Slippers.
At the time of writing, Slippers has over 6,000 followers. The photos posted are the kind you can’t see anywhere else, except maybe in candid, in-depth interior profiles or messages between well-heeled decorators and their clients (Kelly has occasionally shared screenshots of these too). At present, @slipperspinkhome is still only on view for those lucky 6,000, so you’ll have to use your imagination here.
The account is a behind-the-scenes look into the meticulous making of a dream home (really, something out of a dream): the David Lynch-inspired media room where ceiling and sofa and custom bar are a cool, juicy red, the garage with a sparkly pink floor, the custom Rose Cumming wallpaper being put up in the master bedroom (“lots of effort went into this specific shade of pink,” Kelly writes in the caption). These are lavish, fantastic decisions, not quiet ones, all inspired by Jayne Mansfield’s famously decadent Pink Palace, according to the account’s description.
As with almost everything to do with aesthetics, the world of interiors, architecture and living has become a site of conflict. There is a growing unease with the identical stacks of “modern” apartments taking over cities and suburbs, cheaply built and rented out at luxury prices. Apartments like these are the setting of the latest gender scuffle online – a five-and-a-half hour men’s morning routine – apparently designed as primer for a day of making lots of money – that takes place in a high-rise with stark grey walls and very little furniture. I say scuffle, but it’s more of a slam dunk – everyone agrees that the guy doing the routine looked like a fool.
We see new walls like these, unconsidered and mostly unadorned, in the background of the lives of name-brand influencers too. Alix Earle, who comes from New Jersey construction money, posts from a sleek Miami apartment with more clothes on the marble-tiled floor than real home goods.
Disdain for those who miss the mark in making a home look expensive is coupled with a complicated view of those who know how to do it well. When Hannah Neeleman, mother to eight and former ballerina behind the Ballerina Farm brand, first went viral in 2023, commenters obsessively pointed out that the stove in her rustic kitchen retails for $20,000 (it’s an AGA – a stove beloved by posh people in the UK, but Americans don’t know what that is).
I don’t think having a modest home matters so much now. Wealth won, so it’s not as big of a deal if someone shows they know what to do with it. Maybe it’s better if they do, if they make the most of it. So we have trend forecaster Sean Monahan’s boom boom aesthetic, which looks like women in fur coats and men in big suits playing in Trump’s New York like it’s 1987. So we have the protective surge around hierarchical beauty that I wrote about in last month’s column.
Kelly’s house, with its leopard-printed walls and possible recent addition of stuffed exotic animals, is definitely boom boom. But while boom boom is for the boys (Monahan called it a return to “male-coded values”), whatever Eileen is doing, with her commitment to pink and fantasy rooms and ceilings done in chintzy floral wallpaper, is for the girls (it could be called ‘pom pom’ if that sounded better).
But there’s something else too. There is an age where a girl becomes a woman, and there is an age where a girl becomes her house. It might be around 30 – Eileen is 29. Or it might be 23, if, for instance, the girl has made some money as an influencer and wants to invest in something that is good for her brand but isn’t strictly related to how she looks. I don’t mean that women enter a more serious part of their twenties or thirties and are then reduced to the furnishings of their domestic lives. But rather that the edge of the online feminine self has no edge at all, and this becomes clearer when a woman reaches the point when it is socially and financially logical for her to have a more attractive home.
I have no clear answer on how this will play out between the haves and the have-nots. There will always be cheap versions of expensive things for those who want to get the look – in this case, it’s a thrifted fur coat and a pack of peel-off zebra wallpaper you can apply yourself with some grit and a straight edge. But I do think that we’ll see more beautiful homes put together by beautiful women. They will be more visible and they will not seem as easy to achieve. Part of Monahan’s explanation for the rise of boom boom was that young people are working out what it means to dress like an adult. So men put on suits and talk about money – women put on fur coats and talk about lampshades.
