Packing lists and California cool: How Joan Didion made the personal iconic

Before minimalism was a hashtag or lifestyle trend, Joan Didion was living it with elegance and intent. Her now-famous packing list, tucked into The White Album, has become a cultural artefact in its own right—a snapshot of a writer whose personal style was as deliberate as her prose.

A Snapshot of a Life in Motion

There’s something strangely intimate about that list. The leotards. The bourbon. The typewriter. It reads like a still life of a life in motion—a woman ready to cover a riot, fly to San Francisco, or retreat to a motel to write. This wasn’t just about being prepared. It was about curating a self.

Didion's personal image, with her oversized sunglasses, centre-parted hair, and disarmingly slight frame, helped to mythologise her as the embodiment of a certain kind of West Coast intellect. She was California cool before it was commodified—aloof, introspective, always slightly out of reach. Yet her writing gave us access. Her essays, while deeply personal, never felt self-indulgent. Instead, they offered a precise rendering of the self as lens.

Style as Substance: The Narrative of Self

This tension between persona and person, between performance and perception, is part of her enduring allure. She understood that style is not superficial. For Didion, what she wore, packed, and carried wasn’t vanity—it was part of the narrative. The personal became iconic not because she insisted on her singularity, but because she revealed the universal through specificity.

In The White Album, Didion captures the fragmentation of the era not through sweeping claims, but through fragments of her own life. The list, like the essays, resists neat interpretation. It asks us to piece together the meaning. In this way, it mirrors her entire body of work.

The Didion aesthetic—minimalist, melancholy, and meticulously observed—continues to inspire. You see it in everything from contemporary essay collections to fashion editorials. But her influence goes beyond surface. She showed that you could be both stylish and serious, aesthetic and intellectual. Her brand of California cool wasn't about detachment. It was about paying attention.

Revisiting Didion's packing list today feels oddly radical. In a world of excess and overshare, there's power in curation. In choosing what to bring, what to leave, what to say, and what to hold back. It's a reminder that self-expression can be quiet, considered, and still profoundly expressive.