Culture

Everyone Is Tearing Apart This Very Wealthy Writer’s Recount Of Her “Luxury Lockdown”

"As a freelance journalist blessed with an inheritance as well as a venture-capitalist husband..."

by Jared Richards  18 June 2020
Shruti Advani's 'luxury lockdown' article is shredded online

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For some, COVID-19 has been a reckoning of death, disappointment, and crushing financial instability. For others, like private banking journalist Shruti Advani, it’s been an excuse to buy silk pyjamas in various colours. Thankfully, she’s written about her experience.

Writing for the UK Financial Times, Advani outlines how her life has changed under COVID-19 in an article called “The awkward lessons of my luxury lockdown in Kensington”.

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As the article’s sub-heading originally said, it’s offered her “a reminder that privilege does not exist in a bubble”, though the article itself offers no such insight.

Suitably, it’s since been edited. Unfortunately, it’s been edited to “pandemic shows us we owe the most to the people who surround and support us”, something the article also does not say.

Advani begins by describing how our lives have all changed, and we’ve all adapted in odd ways. As a mother of two living in the middle of London, she had to be “pragmatic”.

She willfully “gave up one spare room to bring our nanny into our  South Kensington home and prepared the other for a friend who needed to move to be isolated from her husband, a surgeon.” To be fair, the latter part is a very generous thing to do: it’s also stunning that she has two spare rooms.

With a full house, Advani says her first task was to ‘take stock’ of her resources, and called up her delivery florist.

“Trebling our usual order from the Freddie’s Flowers delivery service was the obvious place to start,” she writes.

“It escapes me now why this particular luxury had struck me as essential at the time. Regardless, I take comfort in knowing that over the past few months, staff, house guests and my children’s online teachers may have seen or heard some bizarre things, but it has always been against the backdrop of a tidy room with fresh flowers.”

Amid other revelations, such as being thankful for her Chelsea gym delivering “protein shakes, artisanal coffees and snacks” to her door now that the luxe food halls at Harrod’s were closed, Advani had one big issue: her wardrobe. Home-schooling her children was hard, but thankfully she found a £65-95 an hour online tutor for chess and maths. Too easy.

“As a freelance journalist blessed with an inheritance as well as a venture-capitalist husband, my work wardrobe is split in a rather self-contradictory manner between Chanel tweed blazers that I wear to interviews and athleisure for when I toil in front of a computer.”

Luckily, a personal shopped ‘advised her’ to buy linen or denim boiler suits, though after spending money on that, she decided to go in another direction.

“Not one to veer too far from the familiar, I turned instead to Olivia von Halle for silk pyjamas in colours guaranteed to make the dullest Zoom meeting come alive.”

The writer does address that she’s ‘armed by wealth’ and “insulated from many of the pandemic’s challenges”, ending it with a reflection on how the spectre of death is a “great leveller”.

The article, of course, has been torn apart online, with many questioning whether it’s a satire. Evidently, it’s written with hate-clicks in mind: it’s hard to imagine the writer or editors didn’t imagine the backlash. But even so, it’s blisteringly tone-deaf: a rich person making fun of their own wealth while flaunting it isn’t satire. It’s just bragging.

Read the full thing at your own discretion, and find some reactions below.