It was the year of girlhood, and it was all tied up in a big, pink bow — quite literally.
Bows are not just reserved for children and babies anymore. In 2023, everything was adorned with ribbons, from catwalks to carpets to Christmas trees. They were clipped in hair, fastened to handbags and even sewn into pastries and tied around chicken tenders in the “coquette” trend currently sweeping TikTok.
And it’s no surprise: The world was captivated by Barbie and the “Barbiecore” trend it spawned and hyped with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which has Swifties glamming up for concerts around the world. It was also the year some other girly micro trends debuted on TikTok, like tomato girl and grocery girl.
But his hyper-feminine babydoll movement first debuted on the runways, led by New York City designer Sandy Liang, whose SS24 collection wass brimming with bows of all different sizes and textures — colossal and tied at the hip, or mini and cascading down the models’ hair.
Meanwhile, Simone Rocha’s FW23 presentation embodied the regal daintiness fit for Marie Antoinette: delicate ribbon-embellished hemlines and jewelry, ornate gowns were peppered with whimsical ties and even the models were crying “bow tears.”
“To us, bows are a way to decorate yourself,” Fletcher Kasell, of cult-favorite label Tanner Fletcher, told The Post in a statement.
The Brooklyn-based designers — which have created an array of bow-adorned pieces, like billowing button-ups with cuffs and collars tied off with ribbons or bow-studded blazers — see the silky ornamentation as a way to straddle the line between masculinity and femininity.
It’s a dramatic shift from the age of “quiet luxury,” popularized by The Row and Phoebe Philo, which was predominantly colorless, mundane, stifled and minimal. Now, bows and feminine-coded accessories — a natural evolution of the once-popular balletcore fad — are a means of vibrant self-expression.
“It seems we’re coming out of a gray, minimal era into a more detailed, ultra-crafted era, perhaps a new gilded age,” Kasell continued. “That being said, I don’t think bows will be going anywhere anytime soon.”
The reclamation of the ethereal ribbon, once emblematic of girlish naïveté and frivolity, is now an empowering embrace of what women were told to abandon after adolescence, what Liang once called a “childhood emblem.”
“I think there has always been a bit of a taboo to being too feminine, too ‘cute,’” artist Lina Sun Park, who adorns food with bows, told Eater. “However, as I get older, and my likes stay more constant, I don’t deprive myself anymore or hold myself to these rules; I’m more indulgent.”
While ribbon detractors have criticized the mass fascination with girlhood and its accompanied “gendered” trends as an “infantilization” of women, Jacqueline Zhang, the co-founder of fashion label Nana Jacqueline, told Elle Canada that bows make her “feel the power of being feminine.”
In a way, it has created a saccharine camaraderie among women akin to the shrill chorus of “Hi, Barbie!” As fashion forecaster and TikToker Mandy Lee put it: “You see another girl wearing a bow, and you’re wearing a bow, and it’s like ‘I get you.’”