A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.

The Floss Dance

What this meme means

The Floss is a dance in which a person alternately sways their hips and swings their arms in front of and behind the body. The dance is associated with American teenager Russell Horning, who posted a video in 2016 that made the move mass-popular, but he was not the first to perform it.

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Early versions of the move

The Floss is a dance in which the arms swing alternately in front of the body and behind the back while the hips sway from side to side in the opposite rhythm. Individual videos with a similar movement existed before the dance became widely recognized; some sources link it to elements of cheerleading and competitive gymnastics, where similar arm-and-hip coordination was used as part of warm-ups.

It is not known who first performed the movement in this form, or when. It is therefore more accurate to say that a specific person brought the dance mass fame, rather than that he invented the principle of the movement from scratch.

The 2016 viral breakout

The Floss gained wide fame thanks to American teenager Russell Horning, who performed under the stage name The Backpack Kid. His dance videos began spreading in 2016, but the move reached true mass recognition later, when Horning performed it on national television alongside a popular performer; that appearance was many people's first encounter with the dance.

After that, the Floss quickly became a format people repeated in schools, in short videos, and in sports broadcasts as a way to celebrate a good moment. The simplicity of the move, which can be repeated without any training, was the main reason for its rapid spread.

Games and a legal episode

In 2018 the Floss, along with other dances, appeared as a paid emote in the game Fortnite, which caused displeasure among some performers whose moves were used without direct permission or payment. Reportedly, representatives of Horning considered possible legal claims against the game's developer.

By that point, the usual outcome of such disputes in the industry was to drop the claim: individual dance moves are hard to protect under copyright in most jurisdictions unless they are part of a complete choreographic work. The outcome of the Floss dispute itself is not known, so the result cannot be stated with confidence.

A discrepancy in the description

Some descriptions of the meme say Horning “invented” the dance, which is an oversimplification. It is more accurate to say he made the movement widely recognizable thanks to a resonant performance, whereas similar movements existed before him, even without this name or fame.

The distinction matters: it does not diminish Horning's role in popularizing the dance, but it does not allow crediting him with sole authorship of the movement itself.

Example of use

In videos and short clips, the Floss is usually used as a gesture of triumph: performed after a good move in a game, a goal scored in an amateur match, or simply as a joke to emphasize that things went well. A caption for such a clip often reads simply “When I finally turned in the report on time,” with a video of the person doing the Floss.

The format is also played for irony: the dance is performed deliberately awkwardly as a joke about the trend itself, once it has become too widespread to be taken seriously.

Why the dance has lasted

The Floss remains recognizable precisely because of its simplicity: the move is easy to repeat without dance training, and it can be inserted into any video as a short gesture without needing to explain the context.

In addition, the story of the game emote and the copyright debate made the dance a subject of conversation beyond purely entertainment, extending its presence in the news well past the peak of its popularity.