Elsie Clark

RUNNER UP

Finding peace in posh West London mum TikTok

My latest great love is watching wealthy, white young mothers who live in West London go about their day-to-day lives. Yes, I still haven’t seen Severance or Breaking Bad, but I’ll happily spend hours scrolling through Instagram watching strangers live out a fantasy life that sometimes seems as remote from my own reality as Disneyland.

There are many blonde bayalaged women on social media who epitomise this aesthetic, but my favourite is Saff (short for Saffron, naturally) Michelis. Saff got engaged at 17, married at 21, and had her baby daughter Margo at 24. She frequently repeats these statistics in her videos like some kind of crazed Stepford Wives-ian mantra. 

However, while many commentators continue to panic about the influence of so-called ‘tradwife’ content online, I would hesitate to slap Saff with this label. She has stated many times that her apparently conservative lifestyle in no way reflects conservative values, and it’s pretty clear that the crazy compression where she’s taken seven years to achieve what takes the average person does in seventeen is entirely a personal choice. God forbid a girl know what she wants!

Saff’s videos largely consist of her breezing about London accompanied by her sweet toddler and doing activities that sound like they were made up by a finishing school headmistress on marijuana. For example, hosting a tablescaping workshop, because how could you possibly invite friends for an Easter brunch without appropriate napkins or spring-themed decor? Other personal favourites of mine include visiting the ‘family jeweller’ to tune a vintage watch, and her regular ‘unpack my Ocado order with me’ posts. It should be boring watching someone do such a mundane activity as showing you their food shop, but Saff Michaelis’s purchases are not on the same level as yours or mine. No bananas and tubs of cheap yoghurt for her: Saff orders expensive butter beans in glass jars; little tins of luxury anchovies or posh pesto; bags of real Italian pasta and artisan beef broth. All these videos are accompanied by voiceover where she cheerfully explains what she’s done that day in her plummy hockey-sticks tones that will either strike you as mellifluous or extremely jarring.

I used to hover between fascination and disgust when watching Saff Michaelis’s content. When I discovered her (well, 10,000 people already followed her first, but that didn’t stop Christopher Colombus), she was 24 and pregnant. Two years separated us, but she was already married, living in a cushy maisonette that she owns (not rents!) somewhere near Chiswick. This offered a stark contrast to my own life at the time, sharing a house with four female friends while we waged daily wars against hidden mould, a negligent landlord, and Thames Water, who halfway through our tenancy decided we used the same quantity of water as a hamlet in Berkshire and tried to increase our bills to £300 a month.

Saff’s clean, orderly life was aspirational, but also enviable. At the same time, I knew there was no way she could afford to own her chic house and raise a baby on the salary of an average 24-year-old professional. And lo: a bit of digging reveals that her dad works on King Charles’s comms team, so literally rubs shoulders with royalty. It’s safe to say that her lifestyle is pretty unachievable unless you’re sitting pretty on a pile of family wealth. Coupled with her brazen youth, it’s enough to make anyone feel a bit jealous. And now she earns a decent sum herself through influencing, doing deals with big brands like Waitrose and getting invited to fancy hotels in Antigua and Portugal with her photogenic baby and husband in tow. 

At this point, however, I’ve gone beyond jealousy to pure enjoyment, dare I say ‘love’ of Saff Michaelis. Is this an Orwellian ‘I love Big Brother’ situation, where I’ve been so overexposed and worn down by social media that I haven’t the heart to resist being bombarded with ever-more unattainable day-in-the-lives while working people struggle to pay bills? Potentially. But though her comments section is often filled with sniping complaints about her posh voice, or yummy-mummy clichés, I can’t find it in me to join them. Yes, her lifestyle is pretty extravagant by most metrics, but she doesn’t do it in a show-off smug way. There’s something almost pure about how much she clearly revels in another trip to the arcades of Bond Street, or a long weekend at the family home in Devon. This is just her life, and if you don’t like watching her unpack jars of overpriced butter beans and enthuse about how delicious they are with pastina and browned organic chicken thighs, you can go elsewhere. 

While I don’t think I could ever admit to enjoying ‘tablescaping’ no matter how much money I earn, Saff Michaelis is a person who has clearly made a life for herself that she finds great pleasure in. A lot of luck has been involved, but at the same time it also takes commitment to post incessantly on social media about hosting last-minute brunches, or the best websites for buying £70 shoes for your toddler, and be as successful as she is. Comparison is the thief of joy, after all, so why not share hers while remembering that social media is a highlights reel, and as a mother of a two-year-old she has no doubt spent as many days covered in sick and staring vacantly at a pile of Easter tat that needs to be binned as she has skipping around West London’s organic food shops dropping £40 on heritage artichokes and Dorset ice cream.