Thigh-high Boots Mashups

Submission 21,408

Part of a series on Twitter Image Combination Memes. [View Related Entries]

About

Thigh-high Boots Tweets are a series of Twitter posts featuring photographs of a person or character positioned so the top half of their body lines up with a picture of a woman wearing thigh-high boots. Starting in late April 2020, the juxtaposed images were often tweeted along with the question "Did it work?" on the platform and almost exclusively featured the legs of Lalisa "Lisa" Manoban from the K-pop group Blackpink.

Origin

On April 20th, 2020, the YouTube account Lilifilm Official, officially run by Lalisa "Lisa" Manoban of Blackpink, publsihed "LILI's FILM #3 – LISA Dance Performance Video." The video features Lisa dancing in the thigh-high boots used in the meme. The video went viral on multiple platforms, including Weibo, where it received more than 20 million views,^[1] and YouTube, where it received more than 15 million views (shown below).

Three days later, on April 23rd, Twitter^[2] user @hencty tweeted a photo mashup of Ten from the K-pop group WayV and Lalisa, using Ten's top half from a Twitter^[3] post and Lalisa's legs from the Lili Film video. They captioned the image, "Did it work?" Within one week, the post received more than 12,700 like and 6,600 retweets. The meme is the earliest known example of the "thigh-high boots mashup."

Spread

That day, more posts featuring Lalisa's legs appeared on Twitter. For example, that morning, Twitter^[4] user @_asiLisa shared a variation featuring Jennie from Blackpink's top half and Lalisa's legs. The post received more than 3,100 likes and 880 retweets in less than one week (shown below, left).

On April 25th, Twitter^[5] user @dilfsarek shared a variation featuring the top half of Spock from Star Trek. The post received more than 163,000 likes and 38,000 retweets in less than three days (shown below, center).

By April 27th, the meme had spread to brand-usage as Netflix tweeted^[6] a variation featuring the character BoJack Horseman. The post received more than 92,000 likes and 21,000 retweets in less than 24 hours (shown below, right).

Several media outlets reported on the meme, including The Mary Sue,^[7] Bustle,^[8] Mashable ^[9] and more.