The stylish solo lifestyle of TikTok's Alex Fitzgerald

The NYC art gallery director models living well, mid-pandemic.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩

Thinking about going to see The French Dispatch alone! —Kate

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Fitzgerald living out his farmer’s market fantasies.

After about two years using TikTok, my For You Page has whittled itself down to the essentials: stylish apartment tours and stylish people filming themselves puttering around stylish apartments while Nat King Cole (or something) plays in the background. Alex Fitzgerald’s account is a bit of both.

The 31-year-old contemporary art gallery director has just over 16,500 followers, but routinely lands on my For You Page with popular videos showing the various ways he spends time with himself. Rainy Sundays inside with nothing but a makeshift cheese plate, sunny Sundays adventuring to Fort Tryon Park in New York City, and tips for creating ambiance in your home. It’s all about the ambiance. 

The isolating experience of the pandemic weirdly means that even now that I’m vaccinated and mostly returned to normal life, I’m way more comfortable seeking out experiences alone. I learned to value my own company in a way that is much more enjoyable when it’s not a literal life or death proposition. After watching a handful of Fitzgerald’s videos, even the least adventurous viewer will see the appeal of putting a bottle of wine in an ice bucket and enjoying a drink on their roof alone. 

“I always get comments like, ‘Oh, I wish I could do this.’ Or, ‘I wish I could feel comfortable doing this,’” Fitzgerald tells me over Zoom. “So I feel like a lot of people want to do it.”

For Fitzgerald, TikTok represents a return to the kind of internet he grew up on, like LiveJournal. 

“I actually made a lot of good friends on the internet when I was a teenager,” he says. “So I kind of missed being more, I guess, earnest on the internet.”

As his account has grown, Fitzgerald has been presented with professional opportunities like a recent partnership with eBay. But he’s not looking to make TikTok his new job, or really, for it to be anything more than a nice time. Paid subscribers can read on for Fitzgerald's insights on making solo TikToks, pleasing the algorithm, and creating without wanting to become a creator.