‘How to fold a fitted sheet’ has accrued more than 22 million views, while ‘shelfies’ of neatly folded, colour-co-ordinated clothes come courtesy of a rich subculture on Instagram, from the 1.4 million followers of organiser @EffectiveSpaces to the 4,000 followers of Californian eight-year-old @thefoldingkid, herself the daughter of a folding influencer.
The Telegraph’s own Lisa Armstrong is among the obsessives, having demonstrated on her Instagram the plastic folding contraption that helps keep her shelves satisfyingly sharp. (‘It’s a joy,’ she says. ‘Very therapeutic.’)Add to them Sophie Liard from Surrey, a 36-year-old former retail worker turned folding influencer extraordinaire.
Liard began posting videos on TikTok in 2020, in a good-natured competition with a friend to see who could score more views.
Her first post, showing how to get wax out of a wax-melt burner, didn’t rate highly, but when she began posting the folding methods she had gleaned during her 15-year career on the floor of Guildford’s House of Fraser, her rise to TikTok fame was ‘super-quick’.
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