High-Heeled Woman Stepping Into the New Year

About

High-Heeled Woman Stepping Into the New Year, also known as Woman Walking Into New Year, refers to an exploitable image macro of a Black woman symbolically stepping up a staircase into the next calendar year. The drawing of the woman carries a backpack on her shoulders, filled with labeled blocks of things she is bringing with her. Behind her, left on top of the year she's leaving behind, are different labeled blocks of things she'd rather keep in the past. The original image is from a 2014 Instagram post, but every year around New Year's, new re-edits emerge across platforms.

Origin

On December 26th, 2014, Instagram^[1] artist @peniel_enchill posted the original image (shown below). The post received roughly 16,000 likes in one week and multiple re-edits began to emerge going into January 2015.

Spread

In the immediate days following the image's upload on December 26th, 2014, it would be re-edited and re-mixed into multiple iterations (examples shown below).^[2] Many of these images have been deleted by the original Instagram pages, but some still remain.^[3]

In late 2015, the image reemerged online and saw a resurgence in memes. Memers replaced "2014" and "2015" to read "2015" and "2016" to fit the New Year's transition and edit in new characters to replace the woman, including notable rappers at the time like Meek Mill and Future (examples shown below). The exploitable circulated mostly Black Twitter and Instagram spheres at the time.

The meme went on to be remixed every year around New Year's with the depth of its exploitability becoming more meta as the years went on. Memers began to make the high-heeled woman step backward, fall or jump to the next year by photoshopping the original.

For example, on December 3rd, 2020, Twitter^[4] user @mohale_motaung tweeted a compilation of four images between 2014 to 2021 where the woman was heavily edited to appear sitting down in 2020, presumably defeated by the tumultuous events of the year (seen below). The tweet received over 1,100 likes and 110 retweets in eight months.

Various Examples

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Search Interest

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External References