“This is me if you even care,” the neat white Sans Serif text, contained within Instagram's signature 1080x1080-pixel square block, declared. Just underneath was a big, juicy, vinegar-dripping green gherkin, and around its middle, a pale, powderpuff-pink satin ribbon, tied tightly in a skew-whiff bow. As they so often do, the rudimentary but effective meme quickly went viral across social media at the end of December, with a tidal wave of similar, silly images also taking over TikTok and Pinterest (and likely, group chats everywhere) in the days that followed.
Though bows had been bubbling up for a while under the guise of yet another core-affixed trend dubbed coquette-core, the end of last year saw them reach fever pitch. “The great bow-pocalypse of 2023,” was the title being thrown around in the comments, and buzzy New York designer Sandy Liang was its crowned queen. “I was being sent memes constantly right before the holidays,” she laughs over Zoom, dialling in from her dreamy, chock-a-block studio, located in the windowless basement
