TikTok ‘Hamilton’ Trend Has Women Squeezing Out Of Windows And Dog Doors
TikTokers users who’ve gotten in on the latest Hamilton trend include (from left) Ashby Florence, Sydney Wingold and Tathiana Mikaela Vieira-Martins.
TikTok: @ashbyflorence / @sydwingold / @Tathiana_Mikaela
All over TikTok, women are sneaking out of windows at night dressed in male colonial garb, complete with hand-drawn beards. Why? Because they’re Alexander Hamilton and they’ve got business to attend to far away from the prying eyes of wife Eliza.
The viral craze, mostly popular among younger women, shows participants in founding-father getups — sometimes holding 18th century-style lanterns and quill pens — as they squeeze through windows. All the while, they’re lip-synching to “Best of Wives and Best of Women,” a song from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit Tony-winning musical Hamilton, which blends pop, R&B and hip-hop to tell the story of Alexander Hamilton and America’s founding.
In the tune, Eliza tells her husband to come back to sleep. “I have an early meeting out of town,” he says. She replies that it’s still dark outside, and he answers, “I know, I just need to write something down.”
But Where Is Hamilton Off To?
The song captures Eliza’s loving concern for her husband, who, unbeknownst to her, is leaving before dawn to duel Aaron Burr, who will deliver a fatal shot to his longtime enemy. Here, however, in true TikTok style, the song gets a comedic twist. When Eliza tells Hamilton to come back to sleep, he bristles with annoyance that his intrusive wife has caught him trying to slip out of the house, no doubt on the way to some bad-husband mischief.
“He’s sneaking out for a sneaky link and is frustrated when he gets caught,” said Sydney Wingold, a 29-year-old Toronto-based comedy content creator whose Hamilton video has pulled in more than 25 million views and 4.2 million likes as of this writing. (The musical touches on Hamilton’s involvement in a major sex scandal of the day, the Hamilton-Reynolds affair.)
This isn’t the first Hamilton trend to take over TikTok — in another, users posted photos of their pets doing silly things as Lin-Manuel Miranda sings a line from the song “Dear Theodosia” about parental love and pride. The latest trend’s humor lies in the goofy, exaggerated facial expressions that accompany the reinterpreted “Best of Wives and Best of Women” lyrics, and of course the women’s total commitment to looking the part.
“It’s just all women dressing up as founding fathers, as if we all happened to have colonial fits in our closets ready to go,” said Wingold, one of the participants who actually did. Over years of making comedy content, she’s built up her own personal costume archive. “My closet is basically Spirit Halloween,” she said in an interview.
Comments sections on the videos overflow with questions about how so many women seem to have pantaloons, vests and puffy shirts at the ready. It turns out some just improvised.
“Everyone thinks I went out and bought the costume, but the reality is, I had a 102-degree fever that night so threw on the closest things I could find, got on my window, pushed post and went to sleep,” Ashby Florence, a 24-year old graphic designer in Los Angeles, said in an interview. Her video has been viewed more than 13 million times.
Men are getting in on the tomfoolery too, with a handful now playing a worried Eliza in their own video versions.
TikTok trends provide “absurdist escapism for social media users,” Freddy Tran Nager, a clinical associate professor of communications at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said when we talked about the Italian brain rot obsession. With a phone in everyone’s pocket, joining in is easy, and this trend shows no sign of slowing down. Even Lin-Manuel Miranda himself got in on it.
“It keeps evolving,” Wingold said. “People keep adding new locations, props and scenarios. It feels like an inside joke we’re all in on, and that momentum just keeps pushing it further.”
Indeed, TikTok Alexander Hamiltons aren’t just escaping out of windows anymore. They’re squeezing through doggie doors, popping out of washing machines and clothes dryers and drifting away in canoes and pink pool floaties.
“These are the kinds of trends I love,” said Tathiana Mikaela Vieira-Martins, a 33-year-old small-business owner in Miami, Florida, who opted to escape via swimming pool. “They are simple to do, they do not take themselves too seriously and they remind people that TikTok can just be about having fun.”
Who Started The TikTok Trend?
The start of the trend is widely credited to this video posted on July 22 by a young Hamilton fan who goes by @actuallyhamilt0n on TikTok. In the last weeks, the hashtag #hamiltontiktok has surged more than 225% in the U.S., according to the video sharing platform. And #bestofwivesandbestofwomen, barely used before the trend began, increased by more than 35,000% in the same time period.
“It is unexpected and a little dramatic, which instantly grabs attention,” Mikaela said in an interview. “TikTok loves anything that tells a story in a split second and this trend does exactly that. You do not even need context to be entertained.”
Hamilton continues to be a cultural phenomenon a decade after it premiered. In April, Billboard announced that the show had become the first Broadway cast recording to spend 500 weeks on the Billboard 200. Lyrics like “in the room where it happened” and “I am not throwing away my shot” have slipped into everyday speech. The movie version Hamilton featuring the original cast, released on streaming during the pandemic, will be in theaters nationwide next month.
Ten years on, the show is still finding new ways to sneak into the zeitgeist — sometimes literally.