Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar. If you walk the streets of New York right now, you might notice that bows are having a fashion moment. The Coquette look is in, more people are leaning into a flirty feminine look. Lots of barbie-inspired pink, frills, laces, and pearls, and especially bows. The bow has a long history and a new exhibition at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology unwraps the origins of the bow and helps us understand the significance of the bow in our culture. From its practical use in the 18th and 19th centuries, to its emergence as a symbol of both male and female fashion choices, to its role in how we think about fashion today.

Untying the Bow is on view just for a few more weeks until March 24th at The Museum at FIT. You can see gowns, dresses, shoes you name it, and all from different eras. With us now is Hilary Davidson, associate professor and chair of Fashion and Textile Studies at FIT, and Exhibition Designer and FIT graduate student Bella Moritz. Hi, Hilary and Bella. Welcome to WNYC.

Hilary Davidson: Hi.

Isabella Moritz: Hi.

Kousha Navidar: Hi. Listeners, we want to hear from you. How do you incorporate bows into your wardrobe? Did you wear them a lot growing up or do you wear them a lot now? Call or text us now at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692, or you can reach us on social. Our handle is @allofitwnyc. First, before we dive into bows, in general, as two people who think a lot about fashion, Hilary, what's the special way fashion helps us better understand culture and history?

Hilary Davidson: Fashion is essential to humanity. We wear clothes. We are the only animal who does wear clothes. No matter where you are in time or place, what we do to our bodies, how we arrange our hair, what we put onto our bodies, tells us a bit about the time and the place that we live in. Fashion is essential to culture. It's essential to how we live our lives as humans.

Kousha Navidar: Bella, what got you into bows when you began to organize this exhibition?

Isabella Moritz: I am a very longtime bow enthusiast ever since I was a little girl. My parents recently told me a story that when I was a toddler, I would wake up every single morning and ask for my pretties, my little matching hair clips and I would refuse to take them out for naps. I've actually worn them my whole life and it was so special to get to take something that I've worn every day for years and do a whole exhibit on it.

Kousha Navidar: Wonderful. Let's talk about the exhibit a little bit. Hilary, a big theme is the bow's origins in our culture. One part says that the bow was originally and I quote, "utilitarian". Unpack that a little for us.

Hilary Davidson: Well, the bow is actually a form of bow knot. What's really brilliant about it is it holds things together, but then all you have to do is pull on the tails and they come apart really easily as well. Humans across many cultures, for thousands of years, have utilized this bow knot to keep things on but then have quick release as well, which is really useful for all sorts of especially clothing details.

Kousha Navidar: Got it. What were some of the bow's initial uses?

Hilary Davidson: Well, things like belts, they're very useful for holding things together. Things that you want to tie onto yourself for headwear, especially if you are moving about the world, if you can tie a hat on with a bow knot underneath, the hat's not going to fly off your head. You can use them to tie shoes onto your feet. I think probably the most common use of bows today, anyone who's wearing shoes with laces on it is wearing a bow, any of our listeners.

They're really functional for also adapting clothing to different shapes of bodies. If you take one dress and tie it with a bow, you can adjust the size on lots of different people. It's a really functional thing.

Kousha Navidar: You had mentioned if any listeners are listening that are using bows, well, we actually just have a listener on the phone right now. Erin from the Upper West Side. Well, we're going to get Erin in a second. She has something to talk about with bows. Bella, a question that I had for you. The bow seems to move across gender dynamics, too. What are the tensions between how the bow is seen between men's and women's fashion?

Isabella Moritz: We start to see this when women's wear starts to adopt the usage of the bow tie in different ways, and we see this in a couple of different ways. We start to see it in the workplace when women start wearing pussy-bow blouses. The pussy-bow blouse became a suitable equivalent to the male tie in the workplace. You also see women's wear start to pull the bow tie from the traditional tuxedo ensemble and from men's work wear ensembles as well.

Nowadays, we start to see bows moving in the opposite direction, where gender lines are being blurred by men adopting bows that were worn in more traditionally feminine ways to express being gender non-binary or just wanting to play with their gender expression through the usage of the bow.

Kousha Navidar: Got it. We see that in a lot of Instagram posts, on TikTok. There's a huge explosion of how it cuts across gender and traditional roles. Now, I promised before Erin from the Upper West Side. I believe now we have Erin on the line. Erin, welcome to All Of It.

Erin: Hi, thank you so much. This program is amazing. I remember first when I was a child tying my first bow tie with bunny ears, and I've been making bows ever since. I'm a painter and I think they're just one of the most beautiful forms. My dog wears bows in her hair. I like a simple ribbon. My daughter uses a shoestring for a belt. I also think in French architecture they're beautiful in frames. It's just a recurrent theme that's wonderful. As the speaker mentioned, 19th and 18th century in men's wear, there's nothing more gorgeous than a velvet bow.

Kousha Navidar: Erin, thank you so much for that call. Hilary, how did it sound listening to that? I see you nodding your head over Zoom.

Hilary Davidson: I love Erin just provided the most fantastic examples of all the ways in which people use bows. I'm especially into the bows on the dog. They're this universal detail of clothing that can be used by literally everybody, and their dog. From men, women, children, from the purely highly functional to the most extravagant decorative abstracted bows that we've got a lot of examples of in the exhibition, where the bow just becomes a motif in itself.

Kousha Navidar: Bella.

Isabella Moritz: Not only do we start to see the motif in fashion, but on a recent class trip to The Met, we were looking at decorative arts objects. The bow actually becomes a motif in decorative arts way before it becomes a motif in fashion, which is really interesting. It's on walls, it's on vases, it's on frames, it's on chairs in this flattened form, which was just a really interesting enlightenment because we've been so deep in the fashion of bows that realizing that it extends beyond the fashion is of course a good realization for all of us here.

Kousha Navidar: It's like you're absorbing all this information and then you see it everywhere once you start looking for it. In fact, that's a little bit of a hammy segue into-- and ask that we have for listeners right now. If you can tell us how you use bows in your life, or if you can post bow photos on Instagram and tag us, we would love to get some photos together, dear listeners. Please, post your photos on Instagram and tag us. The handle is @allofitwnyc. Again @allofitwnyc.

We had talked before, Bella, about the Instagram and TikTok explosion. I wanted to talk about that for a second. Your timing with this exhibit seems perfect. Bows have been blowing up on TikTok, especially for what's known as the Coquette style. How would you, Bella, describe the Coquette aesthetic, and why is the bow a symbol of the style?

Isabella Moritz: Well, I think the Coquette is part of a larger aesthetic and almost a core movement. A couple of years ago it started with the cottagecore, and then it moved into balletcore, and then barbiecore, and coquette is just the most recent label that's being put on this feminine expression utilizing the bow. I think a lot of current designers, especially Sandy Liang, who we feature a little bit in the exhibit, has done a huge thing of this.

Coquette is using the bow differently than these other styles, where it's not so much about incorporating the bow as a single element, but coquette is just about taking as many bows as possible, large and small, and putting them on. What's really really sweet, I think, about this trend is its accessibility, is that you do not have to be buying luxury brands to participate in this aesthetic trend. Anyone can purchase a roll of ribbon from their craft store, and tie a million little bows with it, put it in their hair, on their face, on their bags, on their shoes. It's everywhere.

As far as the timing of this exhibition goes, we've been working on this for about a year now, just over a year. As we started developing this exhibition and especially doing our research over the summer, we all had this collective moment of, are we just noticing them more often because we're looking for bows, or are they really just exploding in pop culture? Clearly, as we got into the fall and now even in the last couple weeks of fashion shows like New York and London and Paris Fashion Week, they're definitely having a moment. It wasn't just our frequency bias.

Kousha Navidar: Hilary, go ahead.

Hilary Davidson: I was going to say as well, the Coquette trend is really reflecting back about 300 years with the 18th century Rococo fashions. It's connected into this new appreciation of historical fashion through Rococo core as well and this fabulous period when people applied bows everywhere on sleeves and necks. Although we're seeing it reinvented now, it's also connecting in with beautiful parts of history, people like Madame de Pompadour who really festooned her outfits with bows. There's this history repeating itself in really beautiful ways.

Kousha Navidar: To wrap up in the last 30 seconds, each of you very quickly, Bella, what's your favorite way to wear a bow?

Isabella Moritz: I personally am a lover of the hair bow. I have one in today. I've been trying to wear one in my hair pretty much this whole month. Definitely the hair bow.

Kousha Navidar: Hilary?

Hilary Davidson: I love a really big bow on a shoe. Anywhere on a shoe, I just think it's the most fabulous decadent thing.

Kousha Navidar: That's wonderful. Thank you so much. Hilary Davidson, Associate Professor and Chair of the MA Fashion and Textile Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. You mentioned the bows on the shoes. There is one picture that I saw from the exhibit that had the ankle boot with the bow on it. I thought that was fantastic. If listeners go, you should definitely check that out. Bella Moritz, the exhibition designer and a grad student at FIT. They were here to discuss an exhibit at The Museum at FIT called Untying the Bow about the history of the bow in fashion. It's on view now through March 24th. Hilary, Bella, thank you so much.

Hilary Davidson: Thank you.

Isabella Moritz: Thank you.