Let Black Girl Luxury TikTok Exist in Peace
Earlier this year, after months and months of research, I finally bought myself an Hermès Birkin bag. Relax. I bought a consigned Birkin, secondhand, off of a designer-resale site, but it is a Birkin nonetheless. During the months leading up to the purchase, I combed the internet in an effort to become an Hermès handbag expert, visiting message boards, watching YouTube videos, and comparing and contrasting Epsom leather to exotics to make sure the bag I chose was just right. When it was all said and done—the bag secured, so to speak—I was left with a curious haunting from my Google search bar. It was as if the fervor of my searches stroked the sleeping consumer-tech demon awake, encouraging it to follow me from website to website, social platform to social platform. My sidebars and headers featured rainbow selections of Birkins and Kellys for weeks. My other apps, TikTok included, soon followed suit, and I swirled down the drain of the internet’s one percent.
If you’re one of the more than one billion users who loyally sign on to TikTok for laughs, dances, or cleaning advice, then you know part of the reason for TikTok’s success is its proprietary algorithm. It is, at best, scarily accurate in terms of predicting what users will find most compelling and, at worst, a manifestation of extremely creepy artificial intelligence. TikTok has a way of guessing, before a user has even signed on to the app, what that person will want to see, and those results are refined and learned over the time that a user interacts with content. In fact, you might be freaked out by the entirely too precise assumptions the app can make about your lifestyle and preferences. For example, in addition to strategically grouping me with people who make specialized content about purses, it served me a video one day about the exact and only antidepressant I’ve ever been on. (One I haven’t taken for at least three years!) The app guessed (correctly, might I add) that I, in fact, would enjoy a chemistry lesson on how Wellbutrin works. It also accurately deduced that I was a childless, single Black woman from New York City who made a decent salary and had significant disposable income. While other users might find themselves on any of the various Toks (a pet name for a microcommunity born out of shared interests in the app; think BookTok, WitchTok, or DatingTok), I knew I found my people when, upon buying that Hermès bag, I entered Black Girl Luxury TikTok.
The genesis of Black Girl Luxury TikTok can be traced back to Anita Aloys, who published a viral video in May of 2021, introducing herself as a member of “Rich Black Girl TikTok.” The movement has taken on a more politically correct moniker since then for many reasons. First, finding a humble turn of phrase to speak about having a lot of money is challenging. Second, having a lot of money or material things is not actually the essence of Black Girl Luxury TikTok. There’s no singular way of defining Black Girl Luxury TikTok, as luxury can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But because of the way so many of these interests intersect, a community was born anyway; in it, you can see the full inspirational, hilarious, and complex spectrum of Black women. The content focus spans from shopping to travel to real estate, but the one unifying principle of Black Girl Luxury TikTok is the unabashed freedom and joy of doing whatever TF you want with your own money.
When I video chat with Aloys, a luxury travel TikTok creator who splits her time between Austin, Texas, and Canada, she tells me that overcoming the hurdle of being afraid to spend money on herself in the first place has been a challenge. “I’m from an African household where you’re taught to save, save, save,” she explains. “And even [spending] $30 or $20 used to be such a challenge for me. I would buy something and just hide for a long time. I used to feel guilt, but now I’m a lot more comfortable with it.”
Acknowledging that celebrating or caring for ourselves (in a way that is typically denied to Black women) is not only good but also necessary is another challenge we deal with. Black women have been systemically isolated from the luxury landscape while they’ve simultaneously provided the labor that allows other groups of women, namely white women, to pursue and explore it. Publicizing Black women’s right to enjoy luxury has been crucial to the growth of the community. It helps to normalize Black women participating in something that has routinely excluded them from the narrative—specifically in areas like shopping, fine dining, and travel. Aloy credits Black Girl Luxury TikTok with influencing a large change in her opinions about how to spend her money. “I don’t know if it’s just my experience, but the Black girls on TikTok are welcoming,” she says. “They’re warm. They will envelop you. The community is not exclusive. I think it’s a very welcoming space. People are always like, ‘You go girl!’ or ‘We love to see it!’ or ‘Get this’ or ‘I have this. Don’t buy this.’”
Clarke Peoples, a senior at Columbia University in New York, took a video call with me in her luxury high-rise apartment in Manhattan, which she very proudly pays for all on her own through various streams of income, including monetizing her TikTok channel. Peoples is transparent with her community on how she makes and spends money, going so far as to detail entire weekends of her life and how much they cost. A common TikTok content device, chronicling spending as both offering information and entertainment, this helps build trust and a rapport with followers. It also invites a very critical eye. Her first video that went viral was about her apartment, which cost roughly $3,300 in monthly rent, utilities not included. “A lot of my followers are Black girls around my age who are in high school or in college,” Peoples tells me. “They can connect to the fact that I didn’t grow up with wealth. I think that seeing me at this age, living this life and explaining how you can find scholarships and what work I do and how much I make on TikTok, shows them that this is completely attainable.”
Despite the perception that this corner of TikTok is a carefree, opulent open market, the members of Black Girl Luxury TikTok are financially savvy and dedicated to sharing coveted information that one might not get otherwise. “In a lot of families, you’re encouraged not to flaunt or talk about money too much,” Zoe*, a tech marketing executive born and raised in New York City tells me. “I don’t hold back from sharing because I think it’s going to be alienating to my audiences.” Having grown up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, attending a highly competitive, predominantly white institution for high school and college, Zoe is not a stranger to the luxury lifestyle. She’s been exposed to extreme wealth for a long time and in many ways was conditioned for the lifestyle that she now has. Sharing her experiences is just a natural extension of her real-life persona.
While other bloggers may buy new wardrobes every season, Whitney Woods, a stay-at-home mom based in the U.K. who blogs primarily about fashion, emphasizes that although her closet contains many aspirational pieces, she’s not going into credit-card debt to get them. “I hate wasting money, and I love to buy quality things that I can easily mix and match,” she says. “I wear a lot of the same things in my videos, and I just put them with different pieces.” The stuff she has in her closet are the kinds of things that fashion girls think about before they nod off at night: Khaite minidresses, runway Gucci coats, Fendi swimwear, and that top Molly wore on the last season of HBO’s Insecure.
Because of the way systemic racism functions in our society, anything associated with wealth and power is inextricably tied to whiteness. The mere existence of Black women in spaces traditionally closed to them invites such a localized type of commentary from armchair experts everywhere. Clarke Peoples is taunted with “affirmative action” comments. Strangers often tell Zoe and Woods, both married, that it’s their husbands who bankroll their lives. Ultimately, though, what everyone seems to be after is freedom. “I think if we take a step back and say, What’s true luxury and what’s truly aspirational? It’s a life of leisure,” says Zoe. A life of leisure that perhaps does not include fielding commentary about why you choose or don’t choose to wear your hair natural or having to answer intrusive questions about your shopping habits. When is it our time to sit with the spoils and just be?
As is with most things that celebrate Black women, Black Girl Luxury TikTok is accompanied by a particular kind of ignorance and vitriol, both misogynistic and racist—the intersection of which is called misogynoir, a term coined by Moya Bailey in order to bring attention to the specific kind of systemic violence that is applicable only to Black women. Steffonya Raines, a Toronto-based creator who documents her home, travels, and hair journey for her TikTok community, tells me, “You know, if I was white, would they even question it? Luxury has always been exclusive, so now that Black women are gaining access to it, it’s like, wait a minute. But Black women in luxury TikTok say, ‘I work in STEM.’ They say, ‘Oh, I’m an engineer.’ ‘Oh, I’m a real estate agent.’ ‘I’m a nurse.’ Why is it so hard to believe that these are lives that can be obtained?”
While there’s a part of me that knows the lengths people will go to in order to fake their lives for social media, the problem is that the questions are not equally directed at everyone making the kind of content that celebrates a luxurious lifestyle. There’s a sect of TikTok that follows the children of oligarchs, and from what I see in those comments, no one is asking if they are renting the private planes they claim to be flying on. We just take it at face value since we have been so conditioned to understand that type of expression of wealth.
“It’s just racism,” says Jae Gurley, an honorary member of Black Girl Luxury TikTok, who goes by the handle @jaegurley and delights their community of 1.7 million people with the adventures of their self-proclaimed “Bougie Bitch” lifestyle. “It’s the generalization that all Black people live in poverty, you know? I do understand a part of it is my age, but if I was a white little blonde girl here, there wouldn’t be a question. There wouldn’t be a comment. It would be like, ‘She has rich parents anyway. Moving on.’” Their digital persona is like an amalgamation of Blair Waldorf and the late Joan Rivers, but Black, of course, and nonbinary. Their style includes everything from skirt suits to Savage x Fenty lingerie, and they are now newly into makeup. Gurley and I connect on Hangouts, where I can see into their apartment, also of viral fame. Because of their content, I know it costs $5,000 a month. They are currently a student at NYU, where they were sticker-shocked to see the lives of some of their classmates and confused as to why the people on TikTok were demanding to know just how they became a Bougie Bitch in the first place. “If a creator chooses to be transparent with you, then thats that creator’s decision, but it’s not their obligation to unearth their whole life just for you.” In fact, Gurley says that they willed their life into existence, essentially by faking it until it was real. “How did I learn those things? Being a broke kid, going to a rich school, having rich friends, and needing everyone to not know I was broke. Like, I’m pretty sure everyone knew I didn’t have as much money as they did, but at the end of the day, I could still put on the facade,” Gurley says.
It’s worth noting that this is more or less the way that many people in New York live; it’s a place so vast and expansive that you can still pretty much invent who it is you want to be. While that might be at odds with sharing your life online when it is being branded as something “authentic,” Gurley is now living with a roommate in Harlem and chronicling the ways they are getting their spending under control. It’s easy to demonize the pathology of someone pretending to live expensively and harder to ask ourselves why someone is considered more valuable to the world if their lives look expensive.
Randi Njikelana, a creator from South Africa whose content ranges from luxury travel experiences to unboxing Louboutins and drinking champagne with her girlfriends, experiences a similar prejudice even though she’s miles away from New York City. “Here, we have a very long history of racism, and it’s still very prominent,” she says. “But we have a right to take up space, and we also have a right to things. We’re allowed to live lives that we have chosen for ourselves without being always concerned about what the next person is going to say.”
Black Girl Luxury TikTok is about carving out tiny roadways of freedom in ways that are within our individual and collective power. It is empowering to recognize your needs and wants and to address them for yourself. As Aloys tells me, “I take care of business first, and then I treat myself, because I feel like I deserve it because I’ve earned it.” There’s no rule book for living in a luxurious way. It does not need to be done by buying a new Chanel bag. But if that’s what makes you feel free, why not? Take the trip. Get the caviar. And if, to you, luxury is pitching a tent in the Colorado wilderness for four days, then do that. Consider sharing it so that other people know it’s an option too.
*Name has been changed to reflect a request for privacy.
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