Never before has a tote bag been more controversial.
Emily Mariko, the TikTok influencer who vaulted to the highest echelons of the “aspirational lifestyle blogger” space after her videos of … salmon-and-rice bowls … went viral in 2021, has finally begun selling her own merchandise—an inevitability for every online personality looking to monetize their wide-eyed, slack-jawed audience. For the past week, Mariko has been teasing the drop, seamlessly incorporating two capacious tote bags into a video of one of her regular farmers market hauls, before becoming increasingly brazen about the fact that she was hawking a product. But what would the bag cost? Fans speculated: $50. No, $200! There was no factual basis for these guesses, but TikTok users passed them along like nuggets of truth and outrage bait anyway. A cloud of irritation was forming above Mariko and her brand, suggesting an imminent deluge of grievance.
Jan. 29, 12 p.m. Pacific time: The “Farmers Market Tote,” as Mariko christened it, went live. The bag—available in two preciously named colors, “eucalyptus” and “strawberry milk”—was priced at a cool $120. Spectators were apoplectic, calling Mariko delusional and audacious for trying to sell an “objectively really ugly bag” for $120. The comments section under Mariko’s most baldly promotional video is almost exclusively made up of comments like: “I’m now a Emily Mariko hater after seeing the price for this SHEIN bag,” “$120 in THIS economy???!!!!” and “I wanna be this delulu.” Fellow TikTokkers, in videos of their own, implored consumers to buy the much cheaper Trader Joe’s or L.L. Bean canvas totes instead. One creator, declaring that Mariko’s actions “should be illegal,” recommended ordering a tote bag from the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba for less than $1.
Mariko—an otherwise fairly innocuous, if comfortingly bland, TikTokker whose last so-called controversy involved baking an unappetizing-looking pumpkin pie—and her sail of a tote were officially caught in a gale of backlash.
I wouldn’t normally bother defending an influencer who trades in Dior and Ralph Lauren partnerships—she and her beautiful, curated, tasteful life will be OK! But in this case, I feel compelled to speak my truth: Mariko’s massive grocery bag and its $120 price tag are fine.
For one, the bag, according to the product page, is 100 percent cotton and made in California—not quite SHEIN and Alibaba, although I know that some consumers have trouble telling the difference. I enjoy a good deal as much as the next person, and I’ll cop to having previously made purchases on sites like the staggeringly affordable Temu, but I’m not going to pretend that those steals aren’t produced on the backs of cheap overseas labor. There is a certain level of uncomfortable cognitive dissonance in all of us who participate in any exchange of goods and services for money, but especially in those who praise products only made possible through underpaid—or at least undervalued—invisible labor, while decrying pricier goods produced, hypothetically, more ethically and more expensively. (Whether Mariko’s totes, while made in California, were produced ethically by fairly compensated laborers has not been divulged to the public.) It’s the same dissonance that I see in conversations about how unaffordable eating out has become in the U.S.: Consumers want tasty burgers, but they also, in theory, support paying servers, kitchen staff, and farm workers a living wage (plus health care!), and also it would be nice if cattle could be raised sustainably and ethically before slaughter, and ALSO can the burger cost no more than $10? The reality is that most restaurants operate on razor-thin margins, even without being able to afford giving health insurance to their staff members; eventually, something has got to give, whether that’s the menu prices, the labor practices, or the product quality.
Secondly, though, I have to ask: What did anyone expect from Mariko, whose entire brand is quiet luxury? The reason so many people follow her—more than 12 million of them on TikTok alone—is for her tantalizingly unattainable lifestyle, one set to the cadences of farmers market trips and leisurely meal preps and vacations in Lake Como and Hawaii and Napa. Her totes aren’t made for me or for you—they’re made for the Lululemon-wearing, Erewhon-shopping, green juice–sipping women who are exactly in Mariko’s demographic. And that’s fine—enough people exist in that category that the tote bags have already sold out, seemingly reaffirming the business decision to price and market them that way.
But what I have found most interesting about this debacle is the long-held resentment it has coaxed forth from those who once professed to be Mariko’s fans. Among the critical responses is one more common thread: How dare Mariko hawk these wares to her followers when she doesn’t even talk to us? “She literally never interacts with her audience but wants us to buy her merch?” one top comment on her most recent video asks (accompanied by a laugh-cry emoji). Another creator, in their own video capitalizing on the controversy, says, “Never once has she tried to comment or like or interact with anybody that supports her. But, when she wants her followers to go support her business and buy her $120 tote bag, she’ll make five videos about it.” Here’s another: “She is not a creator who even talks to you or comments back to you or shows you any kind of love on her posts.” And another: “I personally have never liked Emily Mariko—something about the way she treats her followers like fans; she has no interest in building a community.”
It’s true that Mariko is known for not engaging with anyone on TikTok. There’s a sort of long, layered history to it—in her early days of online fame, she sometimes replied to comments, but somewhere along the way, people began attacking everything she did, yada yada yada—but, suffice it to say that in this current day and age, she does not like, she does not comment, she does not respond. Hell, she rarely even writes a caption to go along with her videos. But this lack of interaction and discernible personality—most of her videos do not show her speaking—have played a key role in her popularity: Mariko has effectively made herself a cipher, there for her audience to watch and project onto and interpret as they see fit. This used to be a part of what they liked about her; queen of never acknowledging any of us is one of the ironic-not-ironic declarations of adoration that fans used to sling about.
What do our idols owe us? Some are of the belief that an “artist” (bear with me, I’m applying that term very loosely here) doesn’t owe us anything beyond the “art” that they choose to share with us—for a singer, that may be their music; for Mariko, her videos that let us fill our days with 60-second bursts of organic fruit washing and herb chopping. But, increasingly, the other camp of opinion seems to be the dominant mode of fandom these days. That is the camp that says that artists owe us everything—their innermost thoughts, their love, their gratitude—for without fans, without followers, without spectators, they would have no livelihood. It is that fundamental belief that has leaked forth in the outsize reactions to Mariko’s totes, an expression of pure parasocial rancor that Mariko gets to live this way, and the carefree buyers of those $120 bags get to, too, but we don’t, and this bitch won’t even tell us how much she appreciates us for acting as voyeurs to her life.
It’s not a particularly healthy way to live. Neither, I’d wager, is putting your life on display for the pleasure and displeasure of millions of people on the internet, but I’m not here to psychoanalyze Mariko. To everyone else, I would advise you to quit it with the loser behavior and direct your ire to the real tote-related gripe worth taking up: the fact that, for $120, Mariko couldn’t even give us a zipper to close the top of the bag so that all our precious farmers market produce won’t spill out.
