Why Is Everyone Taking Photos Of Their Airport Trays?

To Pack and Wear: 2 skirts, 2 jerseys or leotards, 1 pullover sweater, 2 pair shoes, stockings, bra, nightgown, robe, slippers, cigarettes, bourbon. Bag with: shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil. To Carry: mohair throw, typewriter, 2 legal pads, pens, files, house key.

This pared-down, slightly old-fashioned packing list comes from Joan Didion’s The White Album, her second essay collection. It reproduced the roll call of clothes, cosmetics and other essentials that “was taped inside my closet door in Hollywood during those years when I was reporting more or less steadily. The list enabled me to pack,” she writes, “without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do.”

The list has also become more famous than many of her essays, which aren’t exactly obscure themselves. It’s republished in magazines and reproduced, adoringly, in Reddit forums dedicated to minimalist packing. And no wonder: there’s something endlessly fascinating about the things people take travelling. In the list that the musician and poet Patti Smith wrote on the eve of a tour, we learn that she washes her clothes in her hotel sink, “besides my dungarees and my trusty Ann Demeulemeester black jackets”. She inventories Moleskin notebooks, “seven small tubes of Weleda salt toothpaste”, “witch hazel wipes”, and “Loquat leaf tea bags for cough”, then declares: “I guess I am ready.”

This fascination is all over TikTok right now. The “airport tray aesthetic” has more than 16 million related posts, all following the same conceit: an airport security tray full of well-arranged, well-chosen stuff. Passports, plane tickets, phones, headphones, jewellery, hats, bags and even shoes are fashioned into color-coordinated constellations of good taste. The publisher Faber even posted half a dozen trays themed around its books on Instagram.

This trend raises a couple of practical questions. Surely not all this stuff needs to go through a scanner? And surely the people behind you in the queue rushing for their flight would blow a fuse if you took 10 minutes to arrange your tray just so? Clearly, these pictures are—or should be—staged. Last month, the TikToker Chelsea Henriquez posted a tutorial in which she instructs aspiring tray artists to go through security normally, then “GET OUT THE WAY” and set up the photo somewhere a bit quieter. For the sake of everyone in the airport, this is very good advice.