When an individual French fry is being wrapped in a bow, filmed, and shared on the internet, it is a sign that something strange is going on with an age-old symbol of girl- and womanhood. By the end of last year it wasn’t just chips – everything from ice cubes to gherkins, toilet rolls, golden retrievers and a bottle of antidepressants were being prettified, neatly packaged with a single bow and posted on TikTok, where, in some cases, they would rack up millions of views.
It was a satirical conclusion to a year in which we arguably reached peak bow. But the wave never crested. As a trend analyst told the New York Times in September, after a bow-infused New York fashion week: “If you had asked me if we reached peak ribbon two months ago, I would have said yes. But it’s still going.”
Cut to 2024 and, in our TikTok age, where trends are often over before they have properly begun, the popularity of bows still shows no signs of waning: Pinterest predicts bow-stacking – the art of piling bows on bows on outfits, shoes, hair and jewellery – will be one of the biggest trends of the year and bow videos on TikTok have been viewed more than 1bn times. At Milan fashion week in February, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons showed shapeless shift dresses dripping in flat silk bows on the catwalk, as, according to the show notes, they “fundamentally reassessed” what they called “cliches of femininity”.
It’s a trend that emerged from the girlification of everything, from “girl-maths” to “girl-dinner” and a “hot girl summer” that coincided with the rise of hyper-feminine fashion. Early pioneers included Sandy Liang – TikTok is filled with easy DIY tutorials for her stacked hair bows – Shushu/Tong, and Simone Rocha, who pinned whimsical ribbon-bows on to models’ faces like tears. But it was taken further by Viktor & Rolf, who wrapped Jodie Turner-Smith in a giant bow for the Vogue World red carpet.
Maligned for being bland and infantile, beloved by girly-girls and schoolchildren; bows remain everywhere, leaving even Prada wanting to know: “Why do they persist?”