Riccing

About

Riccing is a photo fad in which the subject is photographed while squeezed into a confined space, such as inside of a cupboard, oven or refrigerator. The pose is named after American actress Christina Ricci who began sharing pictures of herself fitted inside of home appliances for her photo series “I Can Fit in That.”

Origin

On November 24th, 2013, actress Christina Ricci tweeted a photograph of herself squeezing into a dryer, proclaiming the image as part of her new photo series “I Can Fit in That!”

Being small does have its benefits however. Look out for my new photo series, 'I Can Fit In That!'. pic.twitter.com/sM6HWY6ueD
— christina ricci (@ChristinaRicci) November 25, 2013

On November 26th, Ricci tweeted a photograph of herself inside of a refrigerator, gaining over 275 retweets and 680 favorites in the first two months.

Yes, pants would have been more appropriate fitting-into-fridge attire. But, hey, I saw my opportunity and took it. pic.twitter.com/s3lhRg9Bg3
— christina ricci (@ChristinaRicci) November 27, 2013

Spread

The photographs did not become widely imitated until January 13th, 2014, when morning talk show host Kelly Ripa uploaded a photograph of herself crawled underneath a desk with the hashtag #Riccing via Live! with Kelly and Michael’s Instagram^[2] account (shown below). Within the first 72 hours, the post garnered upwards of 6,300 likes.

On the following day, E! Online^[1] reported that Riccing was a “new trend” and compared the photo fad to the Lawrencing trend involving makeshift imitations of actress Jennifer Lawrence’s dress from the 2014 Golden Globe Awards. According to the Twitter analytics site Topsy,^[10] mentions of the keyword “riccing” peaked on January 14th with just over 320 mentions.

In the coming days, several other news sites and celebrity gossip blogs reported on the photo fad, including The Daily Dot,^[3] The Daily Mail,^[4] US Weekly,^[5]USA Today,^[6] NY Daily News,^[7] Perez Hilton^[8] and Business Insider.^[9]