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.
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