Angelina Jolie's Leg

Background

On February 26th, 2012, Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie arrived at the 84th Academy Awards’ red carpet ceremony in a strapless black Versace dress with a split revealing her leg. Being one of the most well-known celebrity runway events of the year, Jolie’s red carpet entrance became a much talked-about topic during and after the awards ceremony.

Developments

On Twitter

Soon after her arrival at the red carpet, a Twitter feed dubbed “Angie’s Right Leg”^[1] was launched, accruing more than 12,000 followers within hours. The first tweet was published at 10:36 p.m. (Eastern Time).

On Tumblr

Meanwhile on Tumblr, people began uploading various photoshopped images of Jolie’s leg-revealing pose, some featuring more than one pair of legs and perfectly symmetrical stance. The symmetrically photoshopped version was posted by Tumblr blogger OldGhost and received over 18,000 notes within the first 24 hours. The image jokes were soon picked up by a number of celebrity blogs like Gawker^[3], ROFLrazzi^[4] and Entertainment Weekly^[5] among others.

Photo Fad: Joliening

Angelina Jolie’s memorable pose was imitated by on-stage presenters during the awards ceremony as well, most notably The Descendants co-writer Jim Rash who imitated her stance during his acceptance speech for the Best Adapted Screenplay award. Huffington Posts’ Style^[6] bloggers also participated in the photo fad and shared the pictures via Tumblr.

On the following day, Tumblr and Twitter went abuzz with people taking photographs of themselves in similar poses, which were uploaded under the hashtags #angellegging and #Joliening. Soon, a single topic blog called “Angelina Jolie’ing”^[2] was launched on Tumblr to curate the examples.

Legbombing

Jolie’s leg soon became autonomous as an exploitable image and plugged into various images that were dubbed “legbombing” by Buzzfeed.^[7]

External References