The Most Iconic “What’s In My Bag” Story Happened in 2000

A book that showed the original It girl was one part Kleenex, one part incredible storytelling, and no marketing.

Helen Gurley Brown

I love the book Contents by Kate and Andy Spade. Although it’s from 2000, the lessons the book teaches live forever. To learn more, I interviewed a few people who worked on the project: Michael Ian Kaye (the art director), Julia Leach (the producer), and Jerry Schwartz (the stylist). Read the full piece below.

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The inside of a woman’s bag is a vulnerable place. Really, few places could be more telling—only maybe your DMs could compete. A handheld cache of necessities and mementos, sometimes crumb-ridden, sometimes glamorously organized, generally somewhere in between. If the bag itself is a projection of how we want to be seen, its contents are a mirror of who we really are. So it’s funny that the best example of the intimate anatomy of a woman’s bag to date happened a near quarter century ago, in Contents, a book Kate and Andy Spade published in 2000.

The cover of edition 14 of "Contents". A letter from Andy and Kate Spade explaining the project. The project's credit page.

It was a deceptively simple conceit: The 124-page book, which came in a gray felt bag, showed the contents of 46 women’s bags that had been dumped out and photographed. “It occurred to us that the items in your handbag essentially define who you are and what is important to you,” the late Kate Spade told the New York Times in 2000, “We wondered, ‘Would women from all walks of life be willing to show us their possessions, their keepsakes, their car keys?’” She was: A year before, in a June 1999 Times piece that served as a delightful precursor to Contents, Spade had been interviewed about what she kept in her own bag in a series “What’s In My Satchel.” She revealed a cellphone, a tiny rawhide moccasin (a chew toy for her “Maltese terrier, Henry”), a passport (Spade hadn’t had a license since moving to New York City in 1986), and a digital camera (“for a weekend trip to Kansas City,” her hometown.) Spade’s carryall contents touched on the present and the past, mapped