bow, interrupted
(it's not just about girlhood)
Anything I say or think about bows needs to live in this calendar year. Luckily Emily did a great roundup of bow content earlier this week, much of which lives within girl culture critique. It’s helpful that it’s December and bows have historically had their grip on this month long before Sandy Liang slapped a bow on a Baggu bag that sold out in minutes. They adorn nearly every door and window on my block, beloved interior designer Beta Heuman tied them to every branch, and, yes, they are on every self proclaimed girlie next door. This “December to remember,” instead of a Lexus sitting in the driveway ready to meet its newest teen driver wearing a giant bow, it’s you.
While Simone and Sandy and Sofia have created dresses, hair accessories, bags, movies that have firmly solidified them as this year’s exquisite arbiters of the Bow (bowfluencer doesn’t really work), contemporary bow culture has been at work. Most elegantly with Katie Merchant’s confection of a feed. I scrolled back to the origins of her big bow content: “just wow 😍:”on March 4th, 2020 at the sight of a bow built for the Michelin Man. One day prior, NY Mag had published “Will the millennial aesthetic ever end?” Update : it hasn’t we’re just in her bow era.
The bow lives within a larger millennial design framework. One that involves fake food everything, USM Haller toychest-like consoles, and soft-edged cloud couches. Another notch in the crib-post of adult baby that we collectively cannot quit. The bow is a wiggle that got its shit together in 2023.
The curvilinear line quality of these things—Vetsak sofas, Gohar World strawberry candles, Sophie Buhai barettes—are easy on the eyes, divorced from pain or injury. Why we love bows is why we love cake that is covered in bows. It’s sweet and temporary, but also baby proof—there’s no pain. You couldn’t break a tooth eating a bow made from fondant (The worst thing that could happen is getting a cavity.) A toddler couldn’t hit its head on a wiggle table with no corners. You can’t choke on the pit of an olive pillow. I’ve been drawn to the grocery store aisle of decor—I own a croissant lamp, a cherry pillow and a wheel of gouda candle. They exist like the wooden play food I’d mimic serving to a tea party with Samantha and the Princess Diana beanie baby, except now I’ll construct little tableaus for my feed. It feels both cute and humiliating, nannying ourselves through design choices that only offer soft landings and protect us from the grotesque.
While this year has been the year of the coquette bow, we’ve been slurping in ribbons continuously at high and lowbrow frequencies— through Jojo Siwa’s snatched updos (she let down her hair in 2021, noting "The bow is still a part of my life. I still love bows, I forever will. They're who I am, but maybe I won't wear it every day."), spellbinding uniforms on Cheer (2020), Kourtney Kardashian’s adoration of Disneyland and her endless wardrobe of Minnie Mouse ears, elegant early 90’s suppleness Coco mules from The Row (debuted in 2017), and frequently in a tromp l’œil application at Alessandro Michele’s Gucci (see Spring 2016).
In our aging infancy, we have successfully moved away from tonal coordinated separates or jumpsuits that made getting dressed in 2018 easy (Oshkosh for the biggest osh) but have grown into cartoonish adult doll clothes by way of Loveshackfancy, Hill House Home1, Alessandra Rich, Chanel’s Resort ‘24 collection. Return to office clothes that resemble dressing up for career day. Yes, undeniably girlish! But there’s something beyond Barbie, Lana, and Priscilla here, something that pulled this into a literal and morbid context that met me on my explore page.
I’ve come to know Lilly Davis (@dear_and_darling) with over 190k followers, she and her family do something called “Disney Bounding.” It’s against the rules of Disney parks for anyone over the age of 14 to dress in costumes, so there’s a culture of curating outfits from non-costume items within your wardrobe that resemble Disney characters. On a daily basis, she wears a juicy bow in her hair as she, a self-proclaimed “Amazon Enthusiast,” prepares 8 suitcases of outfits for and her 6 kids and husband, Paul (a man with unparalleled charisma and a love for stretch chinos) to assume the roles of the Little Mermaid in plain clothes. The couple has also recently been criticized for forcing their children to make over 40 videos worth of content of their last trip. The lines between the parks and home have become blurred, with her fat bow she is a perennial Minnie Mouse. While her application is extreme, it runs parallel to cooler bedroom-y bow content, another tightly controlled interior with cartoonish definition and renders the banal to be more precious.
Bows embellish the entropy. They tie loose ends, they provide closure for whatever vignette we want to neatly control, keep each hair meticulously in place. So while yes they do act as a totem for reconnecting with a girlhood gone too soon, it’s also important to notice what objects find their way into physical ubiquity. The things we chose to live with that make their way onto our person, our food, our walls, windows, doors, and trees become this analog filter and mask what we want to not see. It’s the fodder for content that bookends infographics in my stories about two active wars. We’re creating our own parental controls.
What comes after the life of a cheerleader, a child star, a Disney mommy vlogger, a downtown girlie? Unclear, but what we know is a tomato candle cannot rot, a satin bow barrette cannot untie, we want to preserve as much as possible despite the fact these objects will outlive us, our own little memento moris, and whatever we’re employing them to disguise.
