Bows on Everything? How We Frame Femininity & Make Meaning with Ribbon

By Annaliese Terlesky & Madeline Shean

Cover image by Chad Moore featuring Sandy Liang

Studying abroad in Copenhagen, we were thrilled to find a shop that exclusively sells ribbons right near our campus. Upon entering the store, we were met by a wall of ribbons of all colors, patterns, widths, textures…with all these options, you could tie a bow on nearly anything. Months later, this is exactly what seems to be happening on social media: ribbons on Chipotle burritos, on ten-pound dumbbells, on a deer’s antlers, on the straw of a cheap cocktail in a plastic cup, the list goes on. Whether people are trying to Jane-Birkin-ize their bags or laugh at the trend via satirical absurdity, bows have become a pervasive and newly controversial part of fashion culture. 

Images sourced from various users on TikTok

Sandy Liang, the fashion designer who founded her now-famous, eponymous brand in 2014, has, since the genesis of her brand, exhibited women’s clothing designs inspired by the styles of grandmothers in New York City’s Chinatown. To this day, she claims that she is “just a girl designing for a girl.” She creates gorgeous, albeit expensive, items that don't shy away from overt femininity, and this is precisely what makes the Sandy Liang look so unique. The garments in Liang’s Spring/Summer 2024 collection are populated with silk bows of various colors and sizes. A giant white bow is belted across a pleated white miniskirt in Liang’s ready-to-wear take on a bridal outfit. Two light-blue bows adorn the green stem of a silk flower sewn onto a simplistic little black dress. Liang’s new collection puts a spin on classic, iconic staples of the fashion industry (including wedding gowns and the famous little black dress, a design popularized by Coco Chanel) with the addition of brightly colored silk bows that add an ethereal, youthful girl-ishness to what can be considered more refined, “adult” pieces. In fact, the bow has almost become synonymous with the brand as it continues to bear the bow on so many of its designs. So why this new turn towards the frilly, juvenile, girlish aesthetic? 

Sandy Liang Spring/Summer 2024 (images sourced from Sandy Liang’s website: https://www.sandyliang.info/pages/ss-24)

As New York based artist Laila Gohar, whose works with food as her creative medium, recently stated for a Vogue article about the rise of bows in high fashion, “Bows feel festive because they’re nostalgic but somehow also modern. They’re also intricate and have to be tied by hand. The ‘handmade-ness’ is especially important in a time when most things are machine-made. Tying a bow is akin to giving a hug.” Gohar’s conceptual art pieces evoke the lighthearted, ornamental, pastel, aesthetics of the Rococo art period popular in Europe during the mid-18th century. She often uses bows and lace to ornament her works, infusing her edible pieces with Rococo's lighthearted opulence. The youthfulness of Gohar’s work and the pearlescence of Liang’s silk bows similarly evoke the warmth and joy of adolescent girlhood, a feeling that has perhaps been lost in contemporary cultural climates where girlishness and over-the-top femininity has been synonymized with innocence, naivete, and female fragility. Her assertion that bows are a powerful reminder of festivity, and that they evoke the warmth of a hug, speaks power to the celebratory reintroduction of overt femininity into the oeuvre of high fashion and the feminine pride that designs such as Liang’s conjure. The return of gigantic, pink and pastel bows to women’s fashion can be read as a direct resistance to the pejoration of femininity. Brands such as Commes de Garcons have taken a more toned-down approach to the bow trend, creating white collared blouses adorned with white and/or black bows that add a playfulness to the drab traditional white blouse characteristic of many women’s work wardrobes. Rather than conform to societal ideas of the “corporate” woman, an archetype that often features austere, simplistic pantsuits, skirts, blouses, dresses, and blazers that mimic professional menswear, fashion houses like Liang are using bows to reinsert femininity into mainstream women’s wear with a powerful force. 

Images sourced from Laila Gohar’s Instagram (@lailacooks)

While the ongoing bow trend has gained much positive attention and traction, it has not escaped criticism. Fashion and culture writer Rian Phin (@thatadult on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok) has recently incited controversy over what exactly the bow might symbolize today as it shows up everywhere and, now, on and around everything. Just a week ago, in a now deleted tweet, Phin wrote, “The bows and ribbons are symbolic of 2023 being the year of the girl-(useless thing) when it should’ve been the year of the girl-feminism…barbie-film, rebranding girl boss culture through uplifting successful billionaire capitalist women, ‘girl math’ being used to advertise in the same time frame where reproductive rights have been stripped, the gender wage gap is still awful, and we lack a globally interconnected feminist movement, they’re literally like bandaids on a problem.” Her point is not that the color pink and bows and the word “girl” don’t have a place in the contemporary feminist effort, or that Sandy Liang is creating trivial designs. Indeed, in response to the resistance she received after critiquing the bow trend, she tweeted, not only that the “coquette cops got” her, but that she praises Sandy Liang as a designer who “didn’t intellectualize her use of ribbons and bows to sell things.” Rather, she argues that representing women and feminism through the bow, through a doll that satisfies all of Western culture’s beauty standards, or through saying things like “girl dinner” and “girl math,” in turn falls short in an attempt to wholly uplift women or femininity as a concept and aesthetic. 

The bow and Barbie are not necessarily a global hero to all women, and these symbols definitely should not be praised as such, but nevertheless should be celebrated on the very basis that they represent the more playful and rapturous parts of an unapologetically girly womanhood. Liang has stated this very sentiment in explaining her continual use of bows in her designs: “I think about what makes me happiest—it is my childhood and the magic and question that came with it.” In line with what Gohar wrote for Vogue, Liang indeed explains that bows express a certain “nostalgia” that she tries to reference in her work. Through designing, she is attempting to access the happiness of childhood again. Bows do just this. So, while Phin’s argument that the bow trend reinforces historical Western beauty and fashion standards does hold, she perhaps unintentionally degrades girliness in saying that any other phrase that follows “girl” is immediately made lesser. Contrary to her implications, “girl” does not inherently contain a connotation of nothingness or triviality. In this line of thinking, bows are not “bandaids on a problem” but rather an effort to keep femininity continuously present before our eyes until it is taken seriously in any setting. 

Two of the mainstream trends circulating right now are paradoxical: on the one hand, bows land on everything in sight, and on the other, “normcore” or “weird girl aesthetic” strives for modesty and plainness (while still remaining attractive, of course). We are also coming out of the year of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which was taken as a pink-hued joke before its premiere, and was then, rightfully so, praised and understood in all its pro-women profundity. Barbie was not, as many had predicted and planned, the less serious movie in the “Barbenheimer” duo to be watched drunkenly after a mimosa brunch before settling down to view the male-centric, scientific Oppenheimer. The most poignant message of Barbie is summarized in the monologue by Gloria, one of the female protagonists from the real world, which begins, “It is literally impossible to be a woman.” Gloria goes on to state:

You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It's too hard!

In brief summary, what Gloria poetically distills is the socially constructed impossibility to be the perfect woman, to do it all, and to do it all correctly, to please everyone while remaining true to oneself, to simply exist. If womanhood has become an identity so wrought with paradoxical rules and boundaries to which adherence is impossible, then perhaps such notions should be shattered altogether. Rather than trying to fit into the predetermined constraints of woman’s fashion, designers such as Sandy Liang are foregoing the use of masculine silhouettes to prove their seriousness in the world of fashion. It is important to note, however, that Sandy Liang’s objective isn’t to over intellectualize femininity. To do so would do femininity—it's bows, it's pink—an injustice. Liang only asks that we embrace the joy that defines girlhood, and wear its bows proudly, seriously, and happily. If Ken is allowed to fill his Mojo-Dojo-Casa-House with horse-themed memorabilia, what he considered to be the pinnacle of masculinity, who is to say that women cannot proudly wear ginormous bows as a symbol of the beauty and power of femininity and the pride it brings.

Sources:

Gonzalez, Tara. “How Sandy Liang Became Supreme for the Downtown Coquette.” Harper’s Bazaar, February 22, 2023. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/designers/a42842431/sandy-liang-downtown-uniform-interview-profile/.

Silver, Jocelyn. “Bow-nanza! How Bows Became This Year’s Biggest Holiday Decor Trend.” Vogue, December 20, 2023. https://www.vogue.com/article/bows-holiday-decor-trend.

Sinclair, Zoe. “Sandy Liang: Grandmas Rock.” Metal Magazine. https://metalmagazine.eu/post/sandy-liang-grandmas-rock.