I Want It. I Got It. I #Restock It.

Julie Kyles displays an empty container to the camera, then immediately starts filling its 4-by-4 grid. A stack of pink mini Solo cups take the first slot; instant teas plunk into the next two; instant lattes round out the row. Product after product is introduced with the tappity-tap-tap of pink, rhinestone-encrusted nails on packaging: deodorant, sunscreen, eye drops, lip masks, Tic Tacs...

Finally, she shuts the clear lid, her plastic vitrine complete.

Welcome to world of #restock content. Here, any empty space — dressers, guest bathrooms, closets, fridges — can be transformed into an image of organized plenty.

Kyles, who boasts 1.9 million Instagram followers and a TikTok audience 5.3 million-strong, has elevated the genre to an art form — high camp femme consumption. A staged domestic world made pink and sparkly and excessive, like a Juicy Couture tracksuit come to life.

But she’s only one of many creators who work in this space. Users package their #restock content in a different aesthetic, somewhere on the spectrum between minimalist greige and hyper-feminized. They draw on elements from viral trends past, like ASMR, unboxing videos, and hauls, filling their videos with an array of soothing, ritualistic elements.

But this is only the first half of the job. Once everything is stocked, it’s ready to be plucked off the shelves. Creators who make #restock content often also make its inverse: #packwithme videos. Any object that’s toted around can be stuffed with the comforts of home, from a suitcase to a Stanley cup. Mini designer purses are stocked with individually-packaged wipes and travel-sized makeup; totes are stuffed with a Russian nesting doll of organizers. The Girl Scout maxim “always be prepared” is stretched to its limit. Surely, four notebooks is overkill, and the portable printer can be done without?

The magic of #packwithme and #restock videos, though, is not in realism or practicality — that kind of stuff rarely drives engagement. It’s the dream of abundance, of wanting for nothing, of merging retail and domesticity. It’s an illusion not only of control, but of self-sufficiency.

How Did We Get Here?

Since the late 1800s, would-be Martha Stewarts have warned women against the supposed moral hazards of clutter, proselytizing variations of what Elsie de Wolfe — interior design maven and noted bric-a-brac hater — warned in 1913: “A woman's environment will speak for her life, whether she likes it or not.” Tidiness was preached as a virtue to the white middle class, and untidiness quickly took on an explicitly racist and classist valence.

But the Marthas’ warnings largely went unheeded, and Americans of all races and classes kept accumulating things. This reached an inflection point in the postwar period, when consumption became a moral imperative, a means of both powering the economy and achieving the American dream. At the same time, architects were imagining ways to conceal all those purchases: As architecture critic Alexandra Lange writes in Curbed, Life magazine introduced the public to the concept of the room-dividing storage wall in 1945. The aspirational imagery concealed domestic labor required to maintain the storage wall — the organizing, the tidying, the restocking — just as the wall itself concealed the objects within. The arms race between the stuff and the stuff made to contain the stuff had begun, and the housewife was stuck in the middle.

A few decades later, clutter was deemed a serious enough issue that it might require expert intervention. Stephanie Winston, founder of the Organizing Principle, helped establish professional organizing in the 1970s; in 1978, both the California Closet Company and the Container Store were founded.

“The mid-century version tended to have a lot of built-ins, so those were permanent things that you and your architect discussed,” Lange tells Bustle. “It was negotiated around an actual need and your actual stuff. But Container Store consumerism can go on forever because it's impermanent. It can be moved around. You can endlessly be trying to optimize your closet. You can endlessly be trying to deal with the more stuff that comes into your life.” Buy, organize, repeat.

Every now and then, counterprogramming emerges. In the wake of the 2019 Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, thrift stores overflowed with discarded goods as people ransacked their homes, intent on rooting out objects that failed to “spark joy.” But inevitably, habits reverted to the mean. In 2020, Netflix corrected course with Get Organized with The Home Edit, a home makeover show that followed a pair of professional organizers, Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin. Unlike Marie Kondo, Shearer and Teplin promise that you can have as many things as you want — hell, maybe you need more! — and maintain control. The trick is to obtain hundreds (thousands?) of dollars’ worth of clear plastic containers, a custom-designed system of all-white shelving, and a label-maker, and go to town. And the apparent whiplash between the KonMari method and the roided-up Container Store consumerism? That was handily elided, as Kondo released a line of organization products with the Container Store.

The images the Home Edit shares on the show and on Instagram are arresting. So many things, so beautifully arranged, so satisfyingly restocked. Yes, vast spaces are required for such stage-setting — space made possible by American urban sprawl, in the shape of the multi-million-dollar estate or McMansions — but that’s part of the aspirational quality of the show. Though “regular” homes are featured on the Netflix series, they ultimately underscore the extravagance of the celebrity abodes they’re placed alongside. And despite Shearer and Teplin’s attempts to sublimate tension between consumption and containment, between the aspirational and attainable, it inevitably rears its head. “Watch as our Nashville team takes this space from cluttered mess to organized success by giving every item a home,” reads the caption under a pantry before-and-after video. “First I need the pantry space lol 💜,” reads the most-liked comment.

Arguably, the most famous photos come from Khloé Kardashian’s pantry. At first, you hardly notice the dry goods, so entrancing are the rows of individually-lit shelves, the matching baskets, the marble countertops. But then the sheer volume of groceries comes into focus: pastas of every size and shape; cans of corn and Progresso soups that roll five-deep; stacks of individually-portioned snacks. It looks not like a home, but an ultra-luxe bodega.

In a world of fast fashion, one-click Amazon orders, and Temu hauls, the paradox of orderly consumption has never felt more tenuous. Our shelves are buckling under the weight of frictionless home delivery.

Writer Kelly Pendergrast refers to this phenomenon as the rise of home-as-warehouse. When Amazon drops a bulk order at your doorstep, the labor of unboxing and shelving the contents falls to the consumer, she writes in her essay “Merchandising the Void.” But LARPing as a supermarket employee is no fun, and robs the products — once so pristinely presented in those expansive, obsessively merchandised aisles — of their allure; to get it back, we’ve found a way to simulate the supermarket at home: a space to be perused and admired. Nowadays, Americans don’t just aspire to organize their store-bought goods. They want to bring the store home — to #restock, and then #packwithme.

“Historically there's a real difference between retail architecture and home architecture,” Lange says. “To try to collapse that difference really doesn't make a lot of sense psychologically to me, unless you're thinking about us all constantly performing for the camera.” Trouble is, we are.

Tidiness As Self-Care

In a 2017 episode of Khloé’s now-defunct YouTube series, KHLO-C-D, Khloé disclosed that she places an extremely high value on organization and tidiness. She, like many of us, feels domestic order is prerequisite for peace of mind.

Reese Witherspoon — a client of the Home Edit, and a producer of the Netflix show — echoed this sentiment in a recent video from the company, in which she’s seen opening a normal-looking fridge, then a beautifully merchandised one that has labeled plastic bins. “Oh, I wasn’t sad,” the text reads, “I just needed an organized fridge.”

Part of the theater of the Netflix show is the reveal, when the newly tidied and color-coded spaces are presented to the homeowner. The relief and excitement is palpable. Watching them, you can almost see the long-held anxiety leaving their bodies. Oh, I wasn’t sad, I just needed an organized garage.

Sometimes, though, people are sad. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal interviewed Container Store CEO Satish Malhotra about the company’s recent success — a phenomenon that could be attributed to a 100-item collaboration with Marie Kondo, and to its products’ starring role on Get Organized with The Home Edit. “It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly was the pandemic versus the Netflix series. The Netflix series probably produced more of the demand, because all of a sudden it was in the eyes of the consumer: ‘Yeah, this is exactly what we need. Now we’ve got a solution,’” he said. “You look at the environment right now and it’s a lot of uncertainty, anxiety, mental health issues. I’m like, ‘Hey, we can help bring a sense of calmness by you taking control of things you can control.’” Malhotra was relatively new to the Container Store, but the company has known for years that, as a store manager told the same publication in 2007, “When someone comes in to organize belts or shoes, there's usually a bigger problem.”

In anthropology professor Katie Kilroy-Marac’s look at professional organizers in the Toronto area, the organizers described frequently working with clients who struggled with disorders such as ADD, depression, fibromyalgia, and even brain injury. But whether or not a messy home is a symptom of something larger, the mess itself can cause distress. “A person may be completely comfortable living within a cluttered space, but may feel a surge of anxiety if they know their neighbor or co-worker is coming over,” Kilroy-Marac says. “The fear here, I think, is that an untidy home might signal a faulty moral character or even a lack of virtue — that an untidy home may betray an untidy mind, or that it might be perceived as lazy, out of control, or undisciplined.”

When someone comes in to organize belts or shoes, there’s usually a bigger problem.

There is shame in failing to maintain order. But what of living in a disordered world? Empty store shelves have long served as a synecdoche for societal collapse, in post-apocalyptic movies and in the breathless news coverage of natural disasters, and the pandemic reminded us how easily the global supply chain that underpins them can falter. Preppers — those who go to extensive effort to prepare and stock their homes in anticipation of apocalyptic disasters — are sometimes laughed at, but didn’t they have the last laugh during the pandemic, as the rest of us struggled to procure toilet paper and face masks? And are their actions really so illogical, when billionaires are snapping up bunkers amid growing fears of climate change and political instability?

“It’s comforting, this idea that you can carve out a little piece of the world and put it to order,” says Kilroy-Marac. There’s an element of self-care at work here — an element that #restock content capitalizes on, and interweaves with retail therapy. Buy, organize, feel better. Julie Kyles herself frequently references her poor upbringing in her videos, that in many ways she’s soothing her inner child with her purchases: “Shopping is fun for me. Being able to buy stuff I couldn’t buy is insane. I enjoy it and I don’t feel bad about it.”

Like prepping, restocking offers a promise of self-reliance. But unlike full-on preppers, the well-stocked housewife needn’t fully acknowledge the possibility of disaster, and can easily deny the anxiety that compels her to fill shelf after shelf. No visible disorder, nothing to pathologize.

These days, the messages on the societal effects of consumption are mixed. Economists frequently champion spending as a means of keeping the economy afloat in the short term, while environmentalists and human rights organizations sound alarms about its immediate and future harms. But for the individual, the pros are obvious and the cons remote.

And you never know when you’ll need that portable printer.