The latest TikTok stitching trend begins with a woman’s video about not liking store-bought pesto.
In September, Susi Vidal, a home-cooking influencer with 3.5 million TikTok followers and over 1.4 million followers on Instagram, shared an unassuming recipe for homemade pesto.
“Call me crazy if you want, but I never liked store-bought pesto,” Vidal says in the video.
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The video accumulated over 10 million views as people began stitching it to lightly poke fun at Vidal’s delivery with sarcastic replies. One of the earliest viral stitches came from @payjthegemini, who joked, “Oh my god, you’re freaking crazy girl!”
Prompt trends have always been popular on social media—on X, formerly Twitter, for example, users will often ask their followers a question or ask for an opinion on any given topic, sometimes leading thousands of people to give their answers and sparking a trend. The idea has evolved on TikTok, where people can respond to each other’s content by stitching videos of their own.
The store-bought pesto video has created a prompt trend of beautiful chaos, as people began stitching it to share their wildest stories, ranging from the mild to the unruly. No topic is off-limits. One woman shared a story about a weird smell in her apartment that turned out to be her neighbor’s rotting corpse. Another person spoke about when she was an intern on Stephen Colbert’s show and clogged a toilet at a company party but didn’t have a plunger, so she had to figure out a way to unclog it. A popular stitch on Vidal’s pesto video routinely racks up hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views.
Some celebrities got in on the trend, including Josh Peck and John Green—who had a story about a “fourth-tier soccer” team.
Vidal is in on the joke. After users left comments on her video like, “Susi, I’ve heard so many fascinating stories because of you” and “I’ve seen so many diabolical stitches that I feel obligated to watch your recipe,” she responded with gratitude. She even participated in her trend (truly giving ouroboros) and told her followers about the first time she got drunk.
Around this time last year, Nicki Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girl” was a trending sound on TikTok and prompted people to tell wild stories—in that instance, by reciting them to the rhythm of Minaj’s song. It’s impossible to predict what the internet will latch onto and morph into a trend, but hearing stories from TikTok users is forever entertaining.