For Gen Z, "What's In Your Bag?" Is An Existential Crisis

For as long as women’s media has existed, there’s been a voyeuristic fascination with the things that celebrities personally use and carry around with them. In 1945 a magazine printed side-by-side images comparing the purse contents of child actress Margaret O'Brien and actress Maria Montez. By 2020, we would see Kylie Jenner pulling a Kylie Skin hand sanitizer out of her Birkin Bag on her YouTube channel.

No matter when and how, it seems we never get tired of peaking into a celebrity’s purse. For seven years Vogue has even been running a YouTube series named “In The Bag” around the preoccupation. In late September, Sophia Richie posted her own “what’s in my bag video” on TikTok (featuring an EpiPen, adding to the video’s realness) and since, the format has taken off on TikTok. Now, #WhatsInMyBag has over 3 billion views on the app alone— and so it seems the “what’s in my bag” obsession has officially been embraced by new generation.

Eartheater’s name has been circulating around the city’s art scene since as early as 2016, when she was regarded more simply as a cutting-edge renegade putting on intensely physical but beautiful contortionist performances at studios and museum spaces. Her music, encompassing the two LPs Metalepsis (2015) and RIP Chrysalis (2015) at that time, were vivid ambient-pop experiments, cold and crystalline one second and harsh and jarring the next. And it was her music, Eartheater says, that eventually caught the attention of Puppets and Puppets designer Carly Mark’s ear. “It's the music that made it all happen, really,” she says.