Halle Robbe was exhausted at the office when she took herself out to a corner store for some caffeine. She bought two Red Bulls, but didn’t have a bag to put them in, so she awkwardly balanced them in her hands with her wallet and keys. Her work friend took a picture of the look, which she thought was hysterical. And thus, Girls Carrying Shit was born.
That was in 2021, when Robbe worked in influencer marketing at an agency in New York City. Now she runs her own consulting business and one of Instagram’s greatest hidden gems, @GirlsCarryingShit, which has 69,000 followers and nearly 3,000 posts, almost all photos of self-identified girls carrying more shit at once than was once thought scientifically possible.
In April, for example, Sasha carried a wine bottle, a cigarette, a vape, a flask, a purse, a lighter, an extra sweater, and a bottle of juice. In May, Naomi carried 14 miniature microphones, and then in June, Emma carried nine juiced lemons. Some girls carry chickens, some girls carry records, some girls carry shit with their feet or on skateboards.
“I had this intrusive thought on occasion about all the things I’m carrying around and how that’s a shared experience,” Robbe says of the time before she created the account. “But I thought that’s silly, I don’t know if there’s anything there.”
In a woman’s world – one that’s full of shit and light on pockets – there’s a near daily need to juggle a comical amount in our hands and on our shoulders. Whether it’s the Luo women in East Africa who regularly carry 70 percent of their body weight on their heads, or it’s the Brooklyn women who never leave the apartment without three tote bags and a spare pair of shoes, women around the world have adapted creative ways to cart their belongings from point A to point B.
Some call it “girl hands” or “girl physics,” what The Cut once described as “the careful calculations by which women manage to carry phone, keys, and multiple beverages with just two hands.” Girls Carrying Shit pays homage to that mundane superpower, with a bio that declares: “after thousands of years without pockets, non-men have evolved a superior grip to carry their shit.”
On the Girls Carrying Shit grid, girls are seen carrying their shit with varying degrees of grace – some with shit wedged in the webbing of their fingers, some with shit nearly spilling out of their arms. But each photo has an organic feel, what Robbe describes as a “behind-the-scenes” quality, “the moments we wouldn’t normally photograph.” The snaps you take on your way to the party, not the bathroom selfies you take once you’ve arrived.
“Sometimes they’re more interesting photos than what you took when you were posing,” Robbe tells PS. She intentionally avoids posting photos of faces, to focus more on what the girls are carrying than on the girls themselves. “There are so many spaces where women are under pressure to look a certain way. From the beginning I thought that would get in the way of really good photos.”
Robbe herself is 27, an Ohio-bred digital marketing wunderkind whose leadership role at her corporate gig left her feeling burned out by age 23. Her dream for the GCS account is to translate its growth into funding for a women’s art collective, something she’s already piecing together through her multiple creative projects. So far she’s produced her friend’s play, “God Mode,” about the experience of “making friends in the girl’s bathroom at the club.” And she’s channeled her teenage Tumblr obsession into Pinky, a print magazine dedicated to all the “non-physical things that girls carry,” which drops its fourth issue in November.
The success of the account, its DMs crowded with submissions from all over the country, has shown Robbe just how fluently women speak the language of holding it all together, literally and metaphorically. For years now, some advocates have been saying that more and bigger pockets in women’s clothing would potentially help lighten the load, and would be a symbolic acknowledgment of the multifaceted roles women play in 21st century society – no longer just as housewives and secretaries, but (ideally) as anything they want to be. And while the fashion industry has started to heed these calls, the utility of clothing is still divided by gender, with some estimating that, on average, women’s jean pockets are half as long as men’s and can hardly fit the bare necessities like an iPhone.
Ironically, women have also been socialized to carry a lot with us wherever we go, whether it’s makeup or Tylenol or mace, even if we have fewer built-in places to stash it. Robbe remarks that her male friends usually just grab their keys and their wallets and “they’re good to go,” despite their sartorial ability to carry so much more. “They’re really underutilizing their pockets,” she says, incredulously. Robbe’s voice is tart and bubbly, like the watermelon White Claw Coco carried in August (in the same hand as her phone, a pack of cigarettes, and two keychains, one with pepper spray attached and another with a stuffed koala).
On GCS, girls carry their shit on sidewalks, at parks, on beaches, on hikes, at restaurants, on rollerblades, in subway cars. They live their lives and find solutions to its little hiccups, like forgetting their reusable tote and having nowhere else to put their beef jerky snacks and their 11 loaves of bread.
The account does double-duty, showing us hilarious and relatable snapshots from an often glossed-over reality of womanhood, but also reminding us – in the form of vapes and raspberries and balloons and electric keyboards – of all the intangible stuff we carry with us everyday, too. All the systemic things that make our lives hard, yes, but also all the things that we hold precious, like our resilience, our ingenuity, and our senses of humor – the joyful things that aren’t such a chore to drag around.
“GCS is a shared bit, it’s a big inside joke between me and 60K people,” Robbe says. “At a time when people are so divided and . . . people are going through things across the world and we can’t help them or touch them, it’s nice to have a shared thread.”
When deciding on a name for the account, Robbe considered more diplomatic choices, like Girls Carrying Things or Girls Holding Stuff. But ultimately, she wanted something that captured the raw humanity of hefting four giant chess pawns between your knuckles or palming a clump of fresh basil leaves on the train.
“Maybe it’s a juvenile part of me that just wants to curse, but I didn’t want it to be dainty or ladylike. We’re carrying shit,” Robbe says. And we’re making it work.
Emma Glassman-Hughes is the associate editor at PS Balance. Before joining PS, her freelance and staff reporting roles spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, travel for Here Magazine, and food, climate, and agriculture for Ambrook Research.
