Who Created The Original Drink Slay Love Catchphrase?

Question

Freya · Answer

If you want the forensic take, I’ve traced the phrase through social-media archaeology and the pattern is clear: multiple micro-creators contributed to its formation rather than a lone originator.

Early documented uses appear in meme collections and image macros from around the 2012–2016 window, and those uses were typically playful edits of the 'Eat, Pray, Love' template. Meanwhile 'slay' was already a cultural staple thanks to drag vernacular and mainstream pop icons, so attaching it to a lifestyle verb like 'drink' was a natural leap. Small hospitality brands and independent bartenders then adopted the line because it read like a one-liner on a chalkboard specials menu. That grassroots adoption is why you’ll see the phrase credited to different folks depending on where you look: a Tumblr post, an Instagram Story, a bar’s neon sign, a merch seller.

In my view, that diffuse origin is the point — the phrase became memorable because it felt communal and remixable. I like knowing that a bunch of anonymous creators and micro-businesses helped it evolve, rather than it being a manufactured corporate slogan.

Piper · Answer

Curiosity tugged at me and I went down a little internet rabbit hole to figure this out, because phrases like that are my guilty pleasure to trace. What I found is messy and kind of delightful: there isn’t a neat single-origin story stamped with one person's name. The phrase feels like a mashup of trends — the slang 'slay' that blew up in the late 2000s/early 2010s, the endless stream of Instagram caption puns, and the way Etsy and small merch shops turned catchy three-word slogans into mugs and tees.

My timeline guess is mid-2010s: Tumblr, Instagram captions, and early influencer culture all tossed around variations of 'Drink, Slay, Love' or 'Slay, Drink, Love' as playful, sassy lines. I even found screenshots of shirts and homemade designs from that era; those kinds of listings often get copied, remixed, and reuploaded, so tracking a single creator becomes impossible quickly. It’s the kind of phrase that feels communal — someone plants a seed with a clever shirt or post, and the internet cultivates it into a little cultural fern.

So, who created it? Honestly, the best I can say is that it was birthed by internet remix culture rather than a single credited person. I love that collective vibe though — it’s like a tiny piece of shared humor that everyone had a hand in shaping. I still smile when I see that slogan on a travel mug at a café; it’s pure, portable sass.

Vanessa · Answer

I tend to picture the birth of 'drink slay love' like a lively night out where someone scribbles the line on a chalkboard and a thousand people copy it. For me, the catchphrase feels less like the brainchild of one person and more like the result of many small creative acts: a Tumblr joke, a drag queen’s quip, a bartender’s punchy menu title, and an influencer’s T-shirt mockup all folded together.

Culturally it rides on two big currents — the 'Eat, Pray, Love' template that people love to pun up, and the word 'slay' which bubbled out of performance and queer spaces into pop lexicon — so the phrase reads instantly as playful and empowering. I find that origin story charming: it’s communal, a little chaotic, and proof that some of the catchiest lines really are crowd-sourced. That communal sparkle is why I still smile when I see it on a neon sign or a cocktail menu.

Lily · Answer

I love digging into where silly little slogans come from, and the story of the 'drink slay love' line feels like a collage made by the internet.

The short version of what I’ve picked up: it didn’t spring from a single, polished marketing room so much as from a mashup of pop-culture shorthand. 'Eat, Pray, Love' set a handy three-word template that people began riffing on everywhere, and the slang 'slay' (which rose to mainstream use through drag culture, reality TV, and pop music) provided the perfect energetic middle beat. Somewhere in the early-to-mid 2010s a Tumblr/Instagram/Twitter swirl started pairing beverage imagery with that three-word rhythm and the phrase 'drink slay love' began to appear on memes, T-shirt mockups, and cocktail posts.

From there it snowballed: bartenders and small Pride-friendly bars leaned into it as a cheeky tagline, influencers stamped it on merch, and graphic designers made neon signs that got shared at late-night brunches and brunch-adjacent parties. So really, it’s the kind of catchphrase that belongs to a culture more than to a single creator — a community in-joke that became branding. Personally I love that communal energy; it feels like everyone had a little stake in making the phrase catch on, which is kind of wonderful.

Skylar · Answer

My take swings toward the remix culture explanation: the phrase reads like a deliberate riff on the rhythm of 'Eat, Pray, Love' mixed with modern slang. That alone makes it catchy, and catchiness is what fuels social media and print-on-demand shops. I think someone somewhere first slapped it on a shirt or a mug as a cheeky caption, and the rest followed.

The more specific origin is fuzzy because those early meme-era captions spread so fast across Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram back in the 2013–2016 window. Vine clips and Instagram posts helped phrases go viral in seconds, and once a phrase lands on an Etsy or Redbubble listing it multiplies — people resell it, tweak it, and sometimes even try to trademark variations. So while I can’t point to a single creator with absolute certainty, the evidence points to a social-media-born slogan that was quickly commercialized. I find that whole lifecycle fascinating: a throwaway caption turns into a mainstream tagline, and suddenly everyone has a mug with the same joke. Makes me want to dig through old Tumblr archives just for fun.

Nolan · Answer

I came across that phrase on a concert T-shirt and it got me wondering who actually coined it, but the more I dug, the more anonymous it felt. It’s the sort of line that rides on trendy slang—'slay'—and the cadence of familiar three-word mantras, so it naturally emerged from a crowd of creators rather than a lone inventor. From a legal and cultural standpoint, short phrases like this are notoriously hard to pin down; people slap them on merchandise, someone might try to trademark a variation, but the original post or joke often vanishes into reposts and screenshots.

So, rather than a single named author, it’s more accurate to say it’s a product of internet remixing and small-business merch culture. That communal authorship actually makes it feel more fun to me — like a tiny inside joke the internet built together — and I kind of prefer it that way.

Who Created The Original Drink Slay Love Catchphrase?

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