Sometime last week I received a text with a link to a TikTok video of a pickle tied with a pretty pink ribbon. The caption read “this is me if u even care,” and my friend’s text read: “This is so you.”
A couple of days later, I sent a similar text to another friend, except there was no pickle, but instead a big black Lab insisting on eating the pink ribbon tied to her head, as “Let the Light In” by Lana Del Rey played softly. My friend is stubborn and beautiful like that dog, and so I let her know: “This is so you.”
That’s how I can sum up the majority of my social interactions over the last couple of days. I’ve sent and received at least 30 similar videos of corn dogs, ice cubes, more dogs and some deer, Zithromax pill bottles, 20-pound weights, letters of resignation, tamales, shallots, and bottles of Tito’s vodka tied with bows, while Lana coos dolefully in the background. These kinds of videos have amassed hundreds of millions of views and likes. They’ve reminded me of specific girls in my life and inspired me to text them about it. They’ve made me tie a ribbon around my boyfriend’s water bottle, just so I could hold it up to him and say, “Wait, do you get it?” They’ve somehow turned the tethering of fabric into a dialect that could never be translated, a secret handshake you didn’t realize you knew.
But why?
Well, it isn’t the most unexpected internet phenomenon. It has, after all, been the year of the ribbon. With tiny schoolgirl skirts, pearl-embellished everything, and square-toe pointe ballet flats, brands like Miu Miu, Simone Rocha, and Sandy Liang found a way to bottle and sell girlhood to eager fashion fans, all tied up in a nice bow—a constant motif seen in all of their most recent collections. Miu Miu adorned its almost-always-sold-out satin ballet flats with bows. At Simone Rocha, models wore ribbons glued to the undersides of their eyes and tied into their long dangling pearl earrings. At Sandy Liang, bows were supersized into large bags, with drooping fabric falling at the shoulder.
On TikTok, these three brands have become a holy trinity of sorts for millennials and Gen Z. In #fashiontok doctrine, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are diaphanous and dainty in a not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman kind of way. If you scroll through the thousands of comments on the ribbon videos, you’ll find their names mentioned everywhere. On the first video I saw from the “ribbons tied to random objects” trend, a comment read: “This is so Sandy Liang–Miu Miu–Simone Rocha coded.”
The obsession with bows feels like a side effect of how women, in large part, have recently embraced the hyperfeminine. 2023 was meant to be the year of the recession, but instead it was the year of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, and the Barbie movie, generating billions of dollars and boosting the economy effectively through the spending power of women. It’s also now been over a full year since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. With women’s bodily autonomy up for constant debate, it’s not exactly a “girl power” era. And dressing like it is won’t necessarily will one into existence. But it does feel like an act of defiance and pride, as though to say, “I’m a woman, goddammit! And I’ll wear a pretty pink bow if I want.”
There’s also, of course, the undeniable infantilization of wearing a ribbon in your hair or pinned to your Peter Pan collar. It’s the kind of aesthetic associated with fleeting girlhood, of a time when you didn’t know your gender could be weaponized against you. And youth, in general, is trending in a big way amongst zoomers, who will tell a 25-year-old they look good for their age and brag about the benefits of starting preventative Botox in college. On TikTok, middle schoolers have gone viral for 12-step skincare videos, where they preach the benefits of anti-wrinkle cream. Younger millennials and Gen Zers lost three years of their normal, precedented youth, to Covid. Ribbons are like a quick fix, something you can tie on to try to make up for lost time, something that screams, “I’M STILL YOUNG!!!”
A couple of days ago, a viral tweet featured the clip from Uptown Girls in which Brittany Murphy’s character, Molly, and the child she’s nannying are spinning ’round on Coney Island’s teacups ride. It read: “grown women participating in a trend to seek a perpetual state of girlhood… preteen girls asking for retinol cream for christmas…”
It made me re-watch the film, and within the first few minutes was a scene I had forgotten entirely about. At Molly’s 22nd birthday party, one of her friends tells her she can get Botox to fix her worry wrinkle. Panicking about that in a women’s room mirror, Murphy abruptly sees an old lady in place of her reflection, before a small voice calls out from a stall: “I had shoes like yours once—when I was five.”
The child is talking about Murphy’s girlish heels, each topped with a large sequined star. This movie came out in 2003—two decades ago!—and yet we are still there, pressing our faces against mirrors, looking for imperfections, and being told we need to buy some glitzy heel or skirt or bow that can maybe help reverse time.
Yes, the bow can be seen as a symbol of women trying to cling to our youth as it has been marketed to us, but perhaps it’s also representative of how collectively stunted and stagnant we are. We don’t want to grow up, and we haven’t grown up. We’re all in that spinning teacup ride, watching time pass us by, while we stay exactly as were.
It can also be seen as the waving of a white flag. With the rise of the bow trend came the resurgence of the phrase “I’m just a girl.” It’s been used to caption these ribbon videos, and to justify unnecessary purchases and just about anything and everything else, like leaving a car running for an entire school day or grabbing only makeup when the house is on fire. I’m just a girl, I didn’t know better, someone please save me.
Alongside the rise of videos featuring corncobs adorned with bows are videos of girls expressing their desire for a stay-at-home life, a rich husband, a sugar daddy—no career or work or aspirations. And ironically, they’ve used No Doubt’s “Just A Girl” as the soundtrack. But maybe they didn’t really read the lyrics:
Take this pink ribbon off my eyes
I’m exposed, and it’s no big surprise
Don’t you think I know exactly where I stand?
This world is forcing me to hold your hand
’Cause I’m just a girl
Oh, little old me
Well, don’t let me out of your sight
Oh, I’m just a girl
All pretty and petite
So don’t let me have any rights
Or maybe they just didn’t want to. Once videos dissecting the ribbon trend went as viral as the videos themselves, people got defensive and said things like, “Why can’t girls just enjoy things?” and “Nah, I just like ribbons.” But I’m still sitting here, with a Sandy Liang bow pinned to the back of my hair, as I look up at the large pink bow I’ve hung on my Christmas garland, very much enjoying it, trying to grapple with what it all means.
One friend told me she thought ribbons were actually sort of democratic. You can buy some cheap ribbon, tie it in your hair or on your bag, and achieve that high-fashion “Miu Miu/Simone Rocha/Sandy-Liang core” look without spending more than $5. Another told me she liked how, now, if you step outside of the house with a bow or a ribbon somewhere on your outfit, you’ll get a handful of nods and smiles from girls you don’t know on the street. There is a sense of community.
But just like the pussy hat didn’t save us in 2017, ribbons aren’t going to in 2023 or 2024. Even if some of us have a hard time admitting it, each of us is more than “just a girl,” and ribbons are more than just ribbons. And I’m more than just a girl who likes ribbons, and yeah … this is me if u even care.
