Everywhere you look, women have their hands full.
They are clutching water bottles, phones, cups of matcha and wallets. Now that it’s summer, sunglasses dangle off the pinkies of already stuffed hands. Never mind that women’s handbags, where these items could theoretically live, make up an entire industry and that bigger bags, in particular, are having a moment.
The phenomenon, in which women are gripping their necessities without the aid of pockets or bags, is called the claw grip, and on social media, it has been crowned as a secret superpower.
In one video on TikTok, a woman challenged herself to carry as many items as possible in one hand. She managed 15, including a lip balm, a pen, a bottle of hand sanitizer, a Kindle, a notebook, a wallet, a power bank, a comb and three water bottles. An Instagram account dedicated to girls carrying things (which uses a profane synonym for things and sometimes goes by G.C.S.) posts images submitted by users of their hands full of various bric-a-brac.
Some social media users have gone as far as displaying their hand-held necessities in disposable coffee trays.
Others say that men could never successfully pull off this Jenga act, nor would they understand it. And these videos or photos of women clinging to their belongings are not polished; they are presented as the most mundane of girl experiences — the equivalent of posting your unesthetic breakfast. They are also hilarious.
“I have seen my grandma do the claw grip all her life,” the comedian Atsuko Okatsuka said in an email. “Every grandma of every culture and race always has, like, a napkin or a piece of trash that they’ve been carrying around for a long time, maybe years.”
“I have taken on the passed-down tradition of claw hands myself,” she added. “Whether it’s mayonnaise packets, or napkins or my cellphone, I am always holding stuff.”
For Halle Robbe, personal experience with this tradition prompted her to create the G.C.S. account on Instagram.
In 2021, Ms. Robbe had run out to a nearby bodega. “I just brought my keys, my wallet and my AirPods with me, and then I was going to get a Red Bull,” she said, noting she did not bring a bag. “I had it all in my hand so I took a photo and put it on my personal Instagram with some silly caption that was some version of like, ‘After hundreds of years of evolution, this is what I can do.’”
Her friends responded to her post almost immediately, saying they do the same thing. Ms. Robbe created the G.C.S. account that same day. She initially solicited photos from friends and co-workers and now she receives more than 100 submissions a day.
“I think we’ve all been there when we have just, like, an assortment of stuff and we’re running out the door,” said Abby Cox, 29, a fashion historian and a YouTube content creator. “I need to make sure I have my glasses, I need my water bottle. Do I need to bring a snack?”
“And so you’re going out the door with your purse,” she added, “and then the stuff that should be in your purse.”
A popular theory around the origins of the claw grip is that it is a reaction to Big Fashion’s refusal to provide women with the functional pockets that are standard in men’s clothing.
It was not always this way. As far back as the Regency and Victorian eras, women had pockets in the form of bags that were tied around their waists underneath their big, flouncy skirts, Ms. Cox said. Their dresses had slits through which women could access these pockets, which could be as big or small as necessary.
Alternatively, “they would have pockets in the hems of skirts or they would have what we call butt pockets, because in the back pleats of gowns, you could hide a deep pocket,” Ms. Cox said. In one of her YouTube videos, in which she is dressed in Victorian clothing, she put an entire bottle of Prosecco in such a pocket.
In the late 20th century, as female clothing shifted toward narrower silhouettes and lighter textiles, substantial pockets became difficult to incorporate, so they were sized down or erased from garments altogether, she said.
Perhaps, in the quest for pocket parity, the claw grip is “this weird thing of trying to go without bags and purses to prove a point?” Ms. Cox said. “Are people, without fully consciously realizing it, trying to prove we don’t want bags anymore, we want pockets?”
Several brands have managed to insert themselves into the claw grip chatter, offering products that enable carrying more stuff — think of the wallets or card holders that attach to phones — which turns this act of making the otherwise invisible contents of a bag visible into a marketing opportunity.
“Unlike fashion, you don’t generally see beauty brands because your products are in your bathroom or in your purse,” said Rachel Strugatz, a beauty correspondent at Puck. “It’s much harder for beauty items to become a status symbol in the way that fashion does with sneakers or shoes or handbags or literally anything else where you know what the brand is.”
Last February, Hailey Bieber’s brand, Rhode, released a phone case with a built-in lip gloss holder that generated a wait list of more than 200,000 interested customers. Now, the case and the lip gloss have become immediately recognizable, partly because of how many times they’re seen peeking through women’s hands. Particularly Ms. Bieber’s hands.
Earlier this month, Glossier — which from its earliest days had packaged items in pink transparent reusable pouches — released a pair of terry-cloth shorts with a sliver of a pocket that fit only lip balms. There are also side pockets, which could fit a phone, and a single belt loop, potentially for key rings.
When designing the shorts, Glossier did not set out to meet this phenomenon, but “there was an unconscious knowing” that things are now more likely to be photographed out there, in the wild, “especially something that would be otherwise hidden in a bag,” said Kyle Richardson, a senior designer at Glossier. (The morning of our interview, she carried her phone, office badge, wallet case and a bag of rice in one hand.)
There are also theories that the claw grip reflects the chaos of the minds of women who are thinking through to-do lists and mentally writing text messages and running errands all at the same time.
“I think holding things in our hands actually is our need to keep something in control,” Ms. Okatsuka said.
“I started getting submissions that were like, ‘Oh, I’m carrying XYZ and the weight of the world’ or something metaphorical like that,” Ms. Robbe said. The claw grip, she added, could be seen as “an extension of or in parallel with the mental and emotional and spiritual burdens that women carry.”
In 2023, Ms. Robbe started a print magazine called Pinky to explore the “metaphysical” things women also carry.
It is an idea that the artist Maira Kalman started to explore three years ago.
“One day at a farmers market, I saw a woman carrying an absolutely gigantic cabbage,” Ms. Kalman said in a 2023 TED Talk. “It made me think of all the things women hold, literally and metaphorically.”
Yes, they hold cabbages, balloons, phones. But also: “The home and the family and the children and the food. The friendships, the work, the work of the world and the work of being human. The memories and the troubles and the sorrows and the triumphs and the love. Men do as well, but not quite in the same way.”
She turned her observations into a book of paintings. It is called “Women Holding Things.”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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