The Endless Appeal of "What's In My Bag?"

One woman, two bags: thirteen years apart

Why are “What’s in My Bag?” and “A Day in the Life” posts so compelling?

Same.

They have always been my favorite posts to read, particularly in the early 2010s “golden age” of blogging. I loved seeing what my favorite bloggers carried every day, whether the post was accompanied by an aesthetically-pleasing photo (my friend Amy Stone always had the best ones) or just a jumbled look inside a handbag. I’m not sure if the audience for “what’s in my bag?” posts is primarily millennial women, but my friend group and I avidly discussed these posts and what we had in our own bags on Gchat. I think if I shared this fascination with friends of a different generation, they might think it’s nosy or an invasion of privacy to want to take a peek inside someone’s bag—the millennial version of going through someone’s medicine cabinet at a party. But I don’t think it’s nosy. For me, I view it as an on-the-ground personal ethnography: a way to use possessions to interpret a life. Which pieces are functional in nature? Which have ritual purposes? Do the contents of your bag show that you commute or that you live locally? That you have a child or you’re only responsible for yourself? How do you travel—in your car, walking, on a bike, by public transportation?

Everyone wants to be an anthropologist. It’s the academically-sanctioned way to take a good look at someone else’s life and not be nosy. It’s also the perfect example of an exercise in cultural materialism. There is nothing more telling about a woman’s life than a glimpse into her handbag. If I lived in France, or Ireland, or Egypt, I’d have vastly different contents than what I have in my life today, as a woman in suburban New York with a job in Manhattan. My handbag and its contents can clearly tell you the story of my everyday life if you know how to read the symbols. My handbag and its contents are specific to a time and a place, no matter how much I try to live a “timeless” life—ten years ago (as shown below) and ten years from now there will be different things.

Here’s what’s in my bag today…

Bag | Sunglasses (old Krewe) | Portable battery | Umbrella | Wallet | Keys to my Volvo | House and office keys | Headphones | Trader Joe’s gingermints

(You can also see my summer what’s in my bag? here.)

Beneath the cut is a post I wrote in 2013, dredged up from the depths of my Blogger archives, and an anthropological analysis of the two bags and two lives shared in this post.

February 11, 2013

While at a loss for a blog entry today, I thought that I would take a leaf out of several bloggers' blogs and do a "what's in my bag" post.