Dogs Trust: How trends come about

Where have fashionable dogs trends come from? 

Business is becoming more dog-friendly, shops allowing dogs in, from High St. to high-end designers welcoming handbag dogs with high end treats. Dogs can join people in anything from road trips, walks, to paddle boarding.

Social media is spreading around pictures of cute dogs, in a world currently in a meme revolution. Memes are pictures with a caption which the audience may find can relate to in some way, and therefore making them want to spread the meme. Once the meme has been spread so far people try to recapture the hilarity in a similar way/theme, for example a dog smiling and looking proud to someone, with the caption “When your human says ‘who’s a good boy’ and you already know it’s you” this would inspire someone else to create a meme using an image of a dog just being a dog, e.g. getting stuck in a shoe, and captioning it “Its fashion Brenda, look it up” and so on and so on until the internet is filled with dog memes.

Before its link to social media shared imagery the word ‘meme’ actually referred to an anthropological concept of a cultural product that transfers from one individual to another. The popularity and widespread nature of memes say a lot about modern human communication, and how much we bond and relate to imagery which we can relate to particular acts.

Online Meme Definition: “digital content units with common characteristics, created with an awareness of each other, circulated, imitated, and transformed via the internet by many users”

‘Doggo’ Lingo is something that has come about because this use and spread of memes, the language most often accompanies a picture or a video of a dog and has spread to all major forms of social media. It has even changed the way we talk out loud to dogs, in millennial culture. The words used to consist of suffixes and onomatopoeias that people would normally use when ‘baby talking’ to their animals anyway, and therefore easily slot into social media culture so well, thus spread widely.

Due to the popular spread of this type of meme dogs such as ‘Bork’ the little white Pomeranian has become a recognisable visual with many social media users and has been shared in videos such as Jurassic Bork, The Bork Files etc. and therefore Pomeranian’s are becoming verbally linked with Bork.

The way in which this type of communication linked with dogs is shared on such a rapid rate suggests a link in the spike of people “finding the perfect dog” so they can share their own ‘doggo’ experiences. Examples of this can be seen on accounts such as Dogspotting, with close to 1 million followers. The idea of creating accounts that only share content with this theme has now also been refined to particular breeds, such as accounts based only on Shiba Inu dogs; further pushing this ideal of purchasing ‘the perfect dog’. Rather than tackling this trend, it could be utilised to change the trend of buying a dog to rehoming a dog, with dogstrust.  

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