Hot Dogs or Legs?
— Soft Services newsletter
Revisiting this important question, 11 years later.
Soft Services 11 years ago, Hot Dog Legs happened for the first time.
I’m sorry to tell you this, either because I have just reminded you of a different and relatively utopian internet culture that once existed, that we were once part of, that once slipped through our fingers and is buried six feet beneath the sands of time; Or you’ve never heard of Hot Dog Legs and are about to find out how stupid they are, which is stupid to a degree that influences brain chemistry, stupid enough to be unforgettable, the Memory Police busting down the barricaded door and finding nothing but hot dogs that look like legs.
com . The record credits a Quebecois blogger named Bob Le Chef with starting the Tumblr account known as Hot Dog Legs, which shared photos of variably gorgeous vistas all over the world foregrounded always by a pair of smooth, bare legs folded in forward repose… or, wait, are they two raw hot dogs? That was kind of the whole thing. Bob Le Chef had a co-founder, named Alexis Breult, who established the original blog that would become a top 10 viral moment of the year 2013.
—spread to Reddit and Facebook, where other users seeking to cultivate audiences made their own meaty feeds. com , and just last year, Oscar Meyer unveiled a #HotDogsForLegs billboard campaign, which just goes to show how on top of pop culture the American processed meats industry is. Never in my life have I been as involved with a website or app as I was with Tumblr leading up to this halcyon time. In high school, I kept a blog that mostly featured fashion photography.
, you’re thinking, and yes: Gay, at a time and place where it was less than ideal to be. The specific corridor of Tumblr I visited was a richly textured space far away from home, and I loved to wander there. At the time, the website that drove the most traffic to other webpages was not Facebook or Twitter or Digg but a browser extension called StumbleUpon, in which the click of a Stumble!
button would deliver to you some place of grace or comfort, like a database of rare colors or a zoo’s live panda feed. Similarly, Tumblr felt full of discovery; not a trip, but a fall.
The librarians at KnowYourMeme actually recorded the first reference to Hot Dog Legs occurred seven months before Bob Le Chef’s blog establishment, based on another viral Tumblr post, which itself was a screenshot of an Instagram post of a woman’s legs in a bath and the comment “Oh I love hot dogs”. We know this genius, because his username was also his full government name: andrewpauldavis.
I DM’ed an Instagram user by the same handle to see if he was, indeed, Andrew thee Paul Hot Dog Legs Davis, and he got back to me within a day: “I am haha” Davis was a high school student in Fort Lauderdale when he commented on the photo, which his classmate had posted. Now based in Chicago, he’s a multidisciplinary artist who creates “apocalyptic psych pop” and writes and directs films and music videos.
His appearance—long and lean, red of hair and peach of skin—is not unlike a hot dog. He told me Hot Dog Legs created a minor fiasco when it happened. “I was at a fairly authoritarian Christian school and was forced to have a sit down with the gal and her dad,” he wrote over DM. He had to apologize, and thus avoided publicizing his role in the meme’s invention. Monetization was far from his mind back then, but is much closer now.
“I’ve sometimes dreamed of having a mobile hot dog stand called ‘Hot Dogs or Legs’,” he added. In 2020, Davis released a film that he self-financed and shot over three weeks in South Florida, called Pompano Boy. The film focuses on a minister and his wife about to foster a child, and its set in Pompano Beach, a relatively depressed suburb of Fort Lauderdale. Back in my Tumblr days, I spent a lot of time in Pompano.
My dad had been sent there for work, and I visited a few times a year. It was a strange time, made stranger when my dad had to take the family computer with him, and I got a laptop of my own. Now my portal to anywhere was everywhere. On my days alone, I’d tote the heavy thing in the South Florida heat to the cool comfort of Starbucks, and load up Tumblr. I never went to the beach, because my skin burned too easily.
Here’s the menu: For the immaculate texture that only industrial-grade meat byproducts can imitate, taking some acid to the legs—like the AHA-rich Smoothing Solution —is a one-ingredient recipe for superlative sheen. Surely, if you’re exposing your dogs to the sun, you’re coating them in regular reapplications of sunscreen. Should they feel baked dry at day’s end, a layer of Speed Soak will bring them back to bounciness.
Some texture issues, like the bumps caused by keratosis pilaris, can occur as a result of under-exfoliating, and necessitate a more rigorous resurfacing. The Smoothing Set , which includes the best-selling Buffing Bar alongside Carea Cream and Smoothing Solution, is ready for the job, and provides a three-step routine to exfoliated, hydrated, healthy skin. Brennan Kilbane is a writer from Cleveland.
He covers the beauty and wellness industries for Allure , the Business of Fashion , and others, and is an editor at large for Air Mail Look . He lives in New York.
Tags: Community, Dry Skin, Keratosis Pilaris, Smoothing Solution, Speed Soak