By Sarolta Dürgő. Cover image by Izabelly Marques on Unsplash.
How the Bow Went from Practical Knot to Symbol of Power and Elegance
Long before it embellished couture gowns or ignited aesthetics online, the bow existed as pure utility. A simple double knot—ingenious, efficient, born from the everyday logic of fastening garments and tools across ancient civilizations. Yet even in its earliest form, the bow hinted at something deeper: a choreography of tension and release, of protection and vulnerability, a symbolic language encoded in a gesture. By the Renaissance and into the Rococo, this once-practical knot ascended into the realm of courtly spectacle. Silk ribbons and velvet ties signaled power, taste, and social rank in a world where clothing functioned as diplomacy. Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette transformed the bow into a political device as much as a decorative one: a curated display of femininity, opulence, and persuasion. The bow opened narratives, evolving into a key accessory of style.
Power, Femininity, and Rebellion: The Bow’s Shifting Meaning in Modern Fashion
A bow on a sharply tailored blazer or tied into a buzzcut challenges binary codes and repositions softness as an act of self-determination. The postmodern turn of the 1980s infused the bow with conceptual charge. Designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, and Moschino enlarged, distorted, or displaced it, casting the bow as a critique of tradition and a playful provocation. No longer merely an embellishment, it became a site of cultural interrogation, a statement accessory in its own right.
In contemporary fashion, the bow operates as a compact yet potent form of storytelling. Its scale, placement, or material can alter the entire register of a look—evoking innocence or irony, romance or provocation, minimalism or theatrical excess. Few details carry such immediate emotional range. This elasticity allows the bow to break free from its gendered past. Today, it thrives in the wardrobes of men, non-binary individuals, performers, and queer communities who reclaim it as a tool for aesthetic autonomy.
Bows in the Digital Age: TikTok, Pinterest, and Online Fashion Trends
If designers dismantled the bow’s historical authority, the digital age multiplied its cultural reach. On TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest, the bow has become a shorthand for entire aesthetic universes—coquette, kawaii, balletcore, kidcore, soft-girl—each reinterpreting the motif through its own visual lexicon. Its appeal lies partly in its graphic clarity. The bow photographs well, loops elegantly, and is instantly recognizable even in a scroll-thin second. Users apply it to hair, headphones, pastries, handbags, phone cases—transforming the bow into a viral visual code, endlessly remixable and inherently shareable. Online, the bow has found a new language—communal, playful, digital-first, and a versatile accessory for expressing your style.
Couture Sculpture and Radical Softness: The Bow’s Contemporary Power
In haute couture, the bow reaches an entirely different magnitude. Under the hands of Christian Dior, Pierpaolo Piccioli during his eight-year tenure as creative director at Valentino, and Daniel Roseberry at Schiaparelli, it expands into sculptural architecture—rigid, luminous, dramatically scaled. These bows do not accessorize the garment; they command it.
They occupy space with a sense of grandeur and audacity. Simone Rocha offers a counterpoint: bows crafted from tulle, organza, and satin, rendered translucent and feather-light yet structured with almost surgical precision. Her work frames the bow as a contradiction—a fragile silhouette fortified by intentional design, elevating it from simple fashion accessory to statement piece.
How Gen Z is Using The Bow as a Statement of Radical Softness
Within the cultural rise of “radical softness,” wearing a bow becomes a gesture of resistance against visual cultures rooted in aggression and performance of strength. To choose softness is to reject the demand for hardness; to tie a bow is to assert a right to vulnerability. This impulse is intertwined with a new form of nostalgia. Younger generations revisit childhood symbols—bows included—not to regress but to reframe them.
A ribbon on a leather jacket or a micro-bow on a sharply tailored shirt creates a collision of memory and modernity. It is nostalgia with an edge, reauthored for adulthood. Across runways worldwide, the bow remains a proving ground for aesthetic experimentation. Miu Miu’s preppy micro-bows, Simone Rocha’s romantic sculptural constructions, Schiaparelli’s surrealist interpretations, Valentino’s monochromatic architectural volumes, and Saint Laurent’s razor-sharp minimalism demonstrate the motif’s extraordinary adaptability. One form; infinite meanings as an iconic accessory.
Our Favorite Handmade Bows Come from La Merceria Chiari
The story of La Merceria Chiari begins in 1982, when grandmother Enrica opened a small haberdashery in the center of Chiari, a town in the province of Brescia. Driven by her passion for fashion and supported by her experience as a seamstress, she aspired to create a local landmark for all enthusiasts of the art of sewing. Over the years, her enthusiasm inspired her daughter Francesca, who decided to join her behind the shop counter, carrying forward the family tradition with dedication. In 2020, during the challenging period marked by the Covid pandemic, her two granddaughters, Letizia and Chiara, chose to embark on the same path. From this meeting of generations, La Merceria Chiari was officially born.
Their young and creative ideas immediately took shape thanks to Enrica’s skilled hands and the collaboration with trusted local artisan workshops, giving rise to a perfect balance between innovation and tradition. Today, La Merceria Chiari fully embodies Italian style: simple accessories refined in every detail, enriched with an original, handcrafted touch. The care and passion dedicated to each creation are reflected in every product and customization, making the shop a point of reference not only for customers in the Brescia area but for sewing enthusiasts throughout Italy.
