Searching for Ourselves in Our Possessions: A Chat with the @GirlsCarryingShit Instagram

Words: Katja McMillan

Make it stand out

The Instagram account Girls Carrying Shit claims a simple concept, straightforwardly articulated in the account biography: "after thousands of years without pockets, non-men have evolved a superior grip to carry their shit". The page is a scrapbook of girlies holding everything from the mundane ("headphones, wallet, lighter, cigarette, vape") to the more bizarre ("unidentified cube found on the side of the road"), often precariously wedged between multiple fingers and sometimes haphazardly crammed into various pockets. 

27-year-old Halle Robbe started the account in July 2021 whilst battling burnout as a social media and influencer marketing director. On a bagless, delirious caffeine run, she posted an Instagram story featuring her own hand clutching Airpods, keys, wallet, captioned something along the lines of "the result of thousands of years of evolution". The idea began "small, just me and my group of friends", she says. "I would go out and make people empty their purses and hold their shit. As it grew, I started getting submissions from other people. And here we are". 

These days, the account boasts more than 70,000 followers and Robbe says she gets between 25-60 daily submissions, which she meticulously curates into her version of a public shared album. The collective art project deals with the seemingly mundane - namely lack of suitable pockets on feminine clothes - and gives space to the absurd outcomes which emerge. This glorified preoccupation of the messy, feminised personal has long struggled for legitimate representation in an artistic sense. It's the kind of art which spotlights, as Robbe succinctly puts it, "something that was staring everyone in the face". 
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Despite (more candidly, as a result of) the careful thought behind the appearance of the page, @girlscarryingshit embodies an unpolished realism undoubtedly craved by its authenticity-starved audience. Noteworthy is the nearly exclusive lack of faces on the account, an unfortunate rarity on the appearance-obsessed Internet. But of course, Robbe says, the page is "in the least pretentious way possible, more interested in who these people are, the story behind the objects they're carrying. One of my favourite posts was a few weeks ago, and it's this girl carrying a ticket and her cut off ponytail. That's funny, when the objects being carried are at odds. But simultaneously it feels grounded in reality that these objects could end up in someone's hand at the same time". 

Perhaps it is this expression of identity, visually captured, which might explain the clamour to be featured on the page, whose primary audience is college-age girls. As the first generation to come of age on an already formed Internet, projecting an online persona is almost second nature, and admittedly even the most casual of Instagram accounts participates in a level of superficiality by default. 

“Noteworthy is the nearly exclusive lack of faces on the account, an unfortunate rarity on the appearance-obsessed Internet.”

In many ways, however, the mood is shifting towards more genuine portrayals of the human experience, which Robbe agrees is part of why her account has taken off when it has. Yet with this new era of online 'authenticity' comes a blurring of the line between real life and its carefully thought-out reflection. Curation might be essential to posting online, but it can also transcend to one's very self and its validity, meaning that the way Robbe structures her account is rife for debate. 

"The curation conversation about a month ago was very divisive," Robbe says, laughing. "Someone asked, if I wasn't going to post their photo, could I give them feedback? So I posted kind of jokingly, I could give you all feedback, and people actually wanted it. I suggested a little guide of how to take an aesthetic photo, and that was very polarising, because the style I have [leaned into] is this casual pic dump. I think some people are under the impression I'm posting every single photo I get. Other people wanted it to 'stay candid', even though, you know, it's not. And I do think taking aesthetic pictures is teachable: I learned how to be artsy and develop an aesthetic on Tumblr. Some people were like, yes teach me please, because I don't know how to take a picture like this, but then there was this third view of, it's only for the girls who get it." 

In an age of constant self-categorisation, @girlscarryingshit creates a specific yet unfiltered resistance, making a space where young people can explore collective and personal identity outside of the expectations placed on physical bodies. The page itself is often more on the humorous side - "I don't think of it as a meme account, but it can be really funny," Robbe notes - while those who want to ponder more metaphysical baggage might explore Robbe's biannual zine Pinky. "I always pitch it as: the Instagram page is to celebrate the physical things that girls carry, and the magazine is to unpack the spiritual, emotional, and mental things we carry.”

"It's really important to me that the page is not just for cisgender women. I'm queer, and a lot of my audience is queer, and I don't want it to be a weirdly exclusive page in that way - I'm not here to decide if you're a girl or not when you submit. With the name of the magazine, I felt it was a good opportunity to play off the fingers and play off the whole 'pink is for girls' thing." Robbe also plans to use sponsorships on her page to fund her own art projects and produce those of other people, eventually hoping to give back what she makes to nonprofits.

Although the Internet can be a cesspool of toxicity, it's hopefully not too optimistic to speculate that as long as accounts sharing silly moments of relatability continue to exist, the girls might just be alright. Nevertheless, it would also be nice to have larger pockets.