Natasha MH, What’s Actually in Your Bag Right Now?

Natasha MH is a stylist, academic, and fashion theorist. She justifies the number of books she carries around with her by saying, “I used to live in Halifax, which is notoriously windy. I’m a small person, so it wouldn’t be unheard of for a gust of wind to knock me over. It feels comforting to me to be weighed down by baggage. Not the emotional kind.” It was really hard to try and fit everything into the frame.

1. The bag is by Beaufille, made in Toronto by two very awesome talented designers, Chloé and Parris Gordon.

2. Sunglasses I bought with my first official paycheck. They’re the Prada Baroque ones and I did go ba-roke when I got them.

3. Moleskine day planner. I decided to make it bright yellow, to have a sense of urgency.

4. Purple Moleskine. I take a lot of notes from books and write a lot in here. Sometimes there are half things that I’ve written, or half things that I wanna write.

5. Martin Heidegger’s Basic Writings. I’m sort of trying to think about fashion and temporality, so I’m rereading a bunch of his stuff.

6. Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. This is my safety blanket, if there was a single book that acts as a teddy bear for me. She begins with this one fragment from Sappho and kind of expands to this whole beautiful universe. She’s talking about love and sex and romance and positing that romantic desire or the desire that a lover feels is a fundamental lack. A lot of it is her fascination with literature and writing and poetry, but coupled with this sense of romantic urgency.

7. All my cards.

8. Passport.

9. Phone charger.

10. Post-its.

11. My friend Egin got this for me when he was in Japan. It’s a little illustrated book of Saints in French. It’s very pretty. I was born Roman Catholic and kind of have this weird, enduring, aesthetic Roman Catholicism, and a fascination with saints and theology.

12. Another book — I commute a lot, so I have a lot of time to read. This is Marina Warner’s Phantasmagoria. It’s about the supernatural and its relationship to self. She talks about like, wax, light, breath, clouds, and the entrance of spirit into the material world. She’ll talk about film and she’ll talk about wax castings, and she just kind of has this really broad historical and theoretical and literary knowledge that I find so fascinating. She’s really fun to read.

13. Floss. I am a weirdly compulsive flosser.

14. Cloth for cleaning my glasses, plus some extra hair ties.

15. A sunglasses case, with another pair of sunglasses.

16. Gloves. This is kind of weird. I grew up — my dad’s a forensic pathologist — and so I now have this weird thing where I just wanna carry medical gloves wherever I go, because you never know what you will pick up.

17. A bag of lavender, because it’s calming. Sometimes if I’m really anxious I’ll just like, smell it, and people will stare at me strangely on the subway. But it also keeps your bag smelling really fresh.

18. Gum and a toothbrush, because you never know whose couch you’ll crash on.

19. A lot of pens. I do kind of write and highlight a lot.

20. Makeup. The fun part! I’ll often do my makeup on the subway. From the left:

• Eyeliner brush and MAC Fluidline, which I’ve been using since I was about fourteen. I love doing really thick lines with it.
• Travel size Byredo’s Baudelaire, which I know is technically a men’s fragrance but I love it so much. I’m glad I actually smells good. I basically bought it without smelling it because I love Baudelaire, so when I saw it I was like, “Take my money.”
• Yves Saint Laurent Touche Éclat, for when you wanna look like you slept twelve hours but only slept two.
• Diorshow mascara. It smells really pretty.
• More pens.
• Caudalie Beauty Elixir, My sister got me this for Christmas, and basically it smells like mint. When you really need to wake yourself the fuck up, it helps.
• Hourglass concealer. I only started wearing concealer this past December, when I had a huge stress breakout situation. I was like, “I don’t know how to deal with acne, I guess I’ll wear this.”
• Another tiny sample of Byredo’s Accord Oud. It smells pretty good.
• Hand sanitizer.
• L’Occitane almond hand cream.
• Hourglass primer serum. It works as hair oil when you need it. It also works as a really good primer if you have really dry skin, especially during the winter. It works as a really good night treatment. I really like it.
• Nail polish, in a sort of bluey gray color.
• Glasses cleaner.
• Vaseline cocoa butter petroleum jelly lip balm.
• Benetint, for when you want to like an eighteen-year-old, still unjaded by life, which I frequently do, seeing as I am marching slowly toward my own death.
• OGX Coconut Oil Weightless Hydrating Mist, which is halfway full of water. I have super curly hair, so it definitely helps when you just wanna like, fix it up.

21. Keys.