Maybe you saw that Architectural Digest published a tour of Yolanda Hadid’s Texas ranch house in August? In it, the Dutch former model—a Real Housewives star and the mother of models Gigi and Bella Hadid—poses in a home she’s credited with designing herself. Full of unfinished wood, beige upholstery and light Western touches (sepia horse photos, a “vintage gun” collection), it does not seem like the kind of project that would spark a huge reaction.

Only, on Instagram, it did. There, AD’s two posts on Hadid’s home ignited a frenzy of commenters, hundreds of whom delighted in tearing the project to shreds. There are professional roasts that have been kinder; high school cafeterias less ruthless.

“Is this a new steak restaurant?”

“If Texas Roadhouse and Restoration Hardware had a baby”
“This looks like a retail showroom with a sales lady who’s dressed in a cowgirl uniform”
“It’s giving new Anthropologie in Boise”
“A 1970s era issue of AD just saw this and is turning in his grave!”

The tour, a web exclusive, was not published in print, and while it did well on YouTube, it was not an explosive hit. On Instagram, however, it is among AD’s most engaged-with posts in months, garnering more comments than Jennifer Garner’s and Queer Eye star Antoni Porowski’s home tour videos combined. Several outside publications, including the Daily Mail and Apartment Therapy, published articles about the saltiness of the comments.

The tour also seemed to strike a nerve among design industry insiders, a handful of whom sent me a link to the project soon after it hit their feeds. In the weeks that followed, Hadid’s home kept coming up in chats with editors, publicists and designers alike. The project seemed to mean something. But interestingly—like a Rorschach test—it meant different things to different people.

For some, the project was a prime example of what has become a familiar gripe in the industry, especially among designers: the idea that somewhere along the way, Architectural Digest lost its credibility as an arbiter of taste in the pursuit of celebrity-powered clicks.

In some ways, the complaint is a strange one. AD has always published celebrity homes. Even in its primordial days as a Southern California trade publication, it featured houses that belonged to film stars of the era, like Buster Keaton and Zeppo Marx. During editor Paige Rense’s defining tenure at the magazine—the 1970s and ’80s, what many people think of as the golden era of AD—Robert Redford and Joni Mitchell graced its pages. In 1977, Rense compiled pages from the magazine to edit a book literally titled Celebrity Homes. The idea that there was ever a “pure” (read: celebrity-free) version of Architectural Digest is a fantasy.

But whether the concept is technically true or not, the enduring resentment of the brand’s coverage of celebrity homes gets at a deeper tension underlying design media in general, and AD in particular: Who is it for? Are shelter magazines here to celebrate the craft of the best designers and artisans? Or is their purpose to entertain readers with a window into the homes of the rich and famous?

The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and I think most editors would say that the answer is basically: both. Ideally, publications are able to balance an appreciation of artistic integrity with a certain amount of celebrity spectacle. After all, a lot of celebrities hire great designers to create fascinating homes. In the best of times, it’s a happy equilibrium.

But like all equilibriums, it’s difficult to maintain. If the pendulum swings too far toward high-minded design content, publications risk their numbers tanking—less buzz means fewer newsstand sales and less revenue-generating online traffic. And if the pendulum swings too far toward celebrity coverage, they risk alienating designers—precisely the complaint I’ve heard about the Hadid project in DMs and at cocktail parties.

To be fair, part of this phenomenon might be a perception problem. The unique distribution of social media—where platforms heavily favor popular pieces—has likely warped the sense of what a magazine like Architectural Digest publishes. A chronological scroll through the title’s feed shows a wide range of content, from an analysis of Sigmund Freud’s house to a breakdown of architectural changes being made at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The magazine’s print pages show a similar range. But the celebrity stuff has the most engagement on social media, and it’s likely what Instagram is most readily serving up to followers of AD’s account—so much so that a casual observer could be forgiven for mistakenly thinking the magazine “only” publishes celebrity homes.

At the same time, it doesn’t feel wrong, exactly, when designers privately vent about features like Hadid’s. For them, the issue isn’t an academic question about the shifting nature of design media, but a professional hurdle: Every (highly coveted) slot in AD’s coverage taken up by a reality star who put together her own ranch house is one that doesn’t go to a working designer. As for the project itself, I’m no design critic, but Hadid’s home was described to me by several people as “cookie-cutter” (or worse). It’s hard to escape the conclusion that her celebrity played an outsize role in getting it online.

If the Hadid project is emblematic of a broader shift in design media toward celebrity-centric coverage, it’s not happening in a vacuum.

It’s been a rough period for magazines in general, defined by declining subscription and ad revenue, shrinking editorial budgets and the migration of attention to social media. In 1980, if you wanted to see a beautiful design project, AD was one of a handful of places you could get it. Now, design aficionados are assaulted with content everywhere they turn. Simply put: The economic pressure is real, it’s harder than ever to cut through the noise, and celebrities are a good way to do it.
The mechanics of social media can also create weird incentives. In 1980—peak Rense—there was much less of a reason to publish a project in a magazine purely for the sake of stirring up controversy. Today, however, engagement is a trackable, highly desirable metric. Even projects that aren’t universally admired may be irresistible to editors if they promise to spark a conversation.

Last year AD published the home of Stranger Things star David Harbour and British musician Lily Allen, which revealed that the couple had a carpeted bathroom. Many commenters responded with a serious case of the icks, but the piece ignited a widespread internet debate and coverage in The Independent, The Cut and Homes & Gardens. If AD minded any snark, you wouldn’t know it: The magazine itself responded with a follow-up article.

It’s hard to know exactly what’s behind the publication of a particular design project. It’s possible AD’s editors loved Hadid’s home and were unequivocally happy to publish it. It’s possible they did it through gritted teeth, suspecting it might get roasted on social media—or that they knew it would, and eagerly anticipated the engagement stats. A spokesperson for the magazine didn’t respond to a request for comment.

But if the goal was to grab attention, it worked: Hadid’s home tour has more than 3,000 comments on Instagram. The project that followed—a lovely, understated home by a British designer—has 99.

The “AD is only celebs now” complaint is expected when a reality star is posing in spurs and a cowboy hat in front of an Hermès throw. But I was somewhat surprised that a few people who sent me the link were more upset about what was below the images of Hadid’s home tour: the comments section.

This is another peculiarity of the media climate we’re in. Interior design has never really had a deep culture of professional criticism the way that music, film and theater have. There is no Pauline Kael of decor, or even a Siskel & Ebert. There are legitimate reasons for that: namely, design is ultimately for the people who live in it, and their opinions are the only ones that really matter. But the net effect is that designers have long been accustomed to publishing their work without much public feedback. That has obviously changed.

Generally speaking, design projects that get published online don’t attract the kind of roasting that Hadid’s did—on AD or elsewhere—but it’s more common than you might think. When I brought the issue up with a handful of past and present design editors, all of them winced in recognition. It definitely happens.

Most of the time, the snark descends on a project associated with a celebrity and the critique is at least partially wrapped up in the way the public feels about their latest comings and goings. Yolanda Hadid—who lives part of her life in public—is a perfect example, but she’s not the only one. Just last year, House Beautiful published an article about the salty reaction to a renovation by HGTV fixture Tarek El Moussa.

It may be difficult to rally a ton of sympathy for celebrities getting mocked on Instagram. But the knives come out for the non-famous as well. Commenters can be cruel, funny, and totally arbitrary—piling on over the cost of a sofa, the appearance of the homeowner or a shade of paint. A wave of semi-anonymous snark is not a new phenomenon online, but it’s a sharp contrast to the normal discourse around interior design, which has historically been, at least in public, fairly gentle.

It’s hard to know exactly what to do about it. Design magazines don’t have the bandwidth or the incentive to aggressively police their own comments sections. (Why limit your own engagement stats?) Plus, deleting negative comments can often paradoxically lead to more of them—see the Streisand effect, a phenomenon named, fittingly enough, after a celebrity home. Most publications muddle through the dilemma, occasionally cutting outright offensive comments but largely leaving the peanut gallery to itself. Designers and their clients are left to cross their fingers and hope for the best.

The fact that there’s not really a playbook, or an established decorum, for any of this speaks to the fact that we’re still in a transitional period as design media adjusts to the realities of the internet. What was once a relatively orderly closed system is now a sprawling, global free-for-all, and everyone is figuring it out. For better or worse, we’re not in Paige Rense’s world anymore. Like it or not, we’re not going back.