We know Bridgerton is successful. Since its launch in 2020, the show has been one of Netflix’s most-prized assets. The statistics speak for themselves. Within a month, 82m households had watched the first season. The second was Netflix’s most-watched English language series at the time. It received Emmy nominations by the truckload. Such is its success that Bridgerton has been credited with a newfound appreciation of stately homes. Clearly, the show is a monster.
However, news this week hints that this might be the tip of the iceberg. A trend has blown up on social media, catching fire with the power of a million Distracted Boyfriend memes, and people are holding Bridgerton responsible. That’s right, the show is so big that it has inspired people to reinvent the way they store food so that it looks like Shonda Rhimes’s design department was behind it. It’s known as “Fridgerton”.
It’s part of a new trend for “fridgescaping”. Now perhaps you are one of those deeply uncool people with commitments and responsibilities that prevent them from spending their lives poring over TikTok for micro-trends to mimic. If so, allow me to explain what fridgescaping is. In short, it’s the art of making the inside of your fridge look as beautiful as possible.
This doesn’t mean buying only premium-brand food, or even arranging your chilled food in the most aesthetically pleasing way. That would be basic and unacceptable. If you really want to fridgescape, you have to bin most of your food and decorate the inside of your fridge like it’s a doll’s house owned by someone who has deliberately rejected reality.
Maybe the fridgescaper will minimise the amount of available space by keeping fruit in large, impractically ornate bowls. Perhaps they will shove everything to one side so that whoever opens the fridge door will be greeted by small vases of flowers. Maybe, like some TikTokkers, they will abandon organic matter altogether in favour of a candle or an ornate mirror, or a collection of framed photographs, or a ceramic swan.
One of the most popular ways to do this is to deck out your fridge in the style of “Fridgerton” – which mimics Bridgerton’s overripe regency-era production. This might strike you as weird because Bridgerton is set in the 1820s, almost a century before Fred W Wolf invented the first electric home refrigeration unit. Yet TikTok is full of fridges that are colourful and ornate, as if their sole purpose was to create Lady Featherington’s boudoir out of their sausage storage facility. In one video, a fridgescaper dons lace gloves and installs gilt-framed photos of the cast, ties a pink ribbon around a tiny plaster bust and puts grubby carrots in a wicker basket. Another balances a tiny plastic horse head next to an extensive collection of mini grape juice cartons, pops a floral teapot behind their sticks of butter and obscures a plastic-wrapped cucumber with a cut-glass bowl of tired-looking flowers. In short, people are making the inside of their fridge look like someone’s granny has tried to hide all her valuables from a greedy relative.
It is, it has to be said, a very stupid trend. The Food Standards Agency has warned that fridgescaping not only decreases the life of food – which should be kept in sealed containers, not chintzy baskets that are hard to clean – but also increases the chances of cross-contamination with harmful bacteria.
As TikTok exists essentially as a demonstration area for awful people to do increasingly stupid things that make you pray for the imminent end of civilisation, fridgescaping will probably soon vanish from the cultural consciousness and be replaced by something far worse. Let’s hope so, because cross-contamination is no joke. It’s one thing for Bridgerton to be blamed for people filling fridges with ceramic swans, but quite another for it to be blamed for a food poisoning epidemic.
