About

Cat Shadow Trend refers to a shadow art trend that involves a crouching participant creating a shadow of a cat with their entire body, similar to a shadow puppet, crossing their elbows and sticking out their fingers in such a way that their shadow forms a cat's pointy ears and whiskers. The trend achieved virality in South Korea in May 2025, with the original photograph that inspired the trend also inspiring a redraw art format.

Origin

On May 4th, 2025, Tumblr^[1] user insecure001 posted a photograph of a young woman crouching down on a road while crossing her elbows next to her head and sticking out her fingers in such a way that her shadow formed a silhouette of a cat. The original post of the image has not yet been discovered. The post (shown below) garnered over 3,500 reposts and 5,600 likes in nine days.

Spread

On May 8th, 2025, X^[2] user @bugbug000 reposted the image, captioning it, "milady," with their repost (shown below) garnering over 31 million views, 66,000 reposts and 670,000 likes in five days.

In the following days, multiple K-pop fans on X^[3][4] and Weverse^[5] requested K-pop idols to recreate the photograph. Starting on May 10th, K-pop bands and idols, including members of LE SSERAFIM,^[6][7] NMIXX and Enhypen, participated in the trend, copying the pose.

Notably, on May 10th, 2025, Norwegian-Chinese model Cindy Zhangyin posted an Instagram^[8] video in which she recreated the pose. The upload (still image shown below) garnered over 5.1 million views in three days.

Starting on May 9th, 2025, users on X / Twitter posted redraws of the original photograph that inspired the trend.

On that day, artist @Akiko_oc posted the earliest discovered notable redraw of the photograph, which used their OC character. The post (shown below) received over 1,700 reposts and 28,000 likes on X^[9] in four days.

In the following days, multiple redraws of the photograph went viral on X / Twitter. For example, on May 12th, 2025, X^[10] user @tabakko posted a fan art of VTuber Shirakami Fubuki doing the pose that garnered over 4,700 reposts and 44,000 likes in one day (shown below).

Various Examples

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Search Interest

External References