Flashback Friday
Donatella Versace wore it first! The designer rocked Jennifer Lopez’s green viral dress in 1999
Donatella became the center of attention, not knowing that it would become one of her most legendary pieces
One of the most iconic dresses —if not the most—is Jennifer Lopez’s jungle green Versace dress with a never-ending neckline from 2000. But before going viral at the Grammys a year before, Donatella Versace wore it to the 1999 MET Gala.
The year’s theme was Rock Style, and Donatella became the center of attention with the dress she designed, not knowing that it would become one of her most legendary pieces. As reported by Harper’s Bazaar, when JLo saw the gown in 1999, she immediately fell in love with it.
The following year, Jennifer’s stylist pulled out two options for her to wear at the 2000 Grammys. Lopez revealed that one of the options was a white dress and the other one was the Versace dress.
According to the singer, actress, and businesswoman, although her fashion stylist advised her to wear the white one, she gravitated towards the green dress, being the first fashion piece to go viral and the reason why today the world can enjoy Google images.
The BBC informed that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed there were so many searches for photos of the dress that it inspired the company to create the option. Google was founded in 1998, and Google Images in July 2001.
“When Google was launched, people were amazed that they were able to find out about almost anything by typing just a few words into a computer,” Schmidt wrote in Project Syndicate in 2015. “It was better than anything else but not great by today’s standards.”
“So our co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — like all successful inventors —kept iterating. They started with images. After all, people wanted more than just text,” he continued. ”This first became apparent after the 2000 Grammy Awards, where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world’s attention. At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: JLo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born.“
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In 2019, Jennifer, Donatella, and the dress made headlines once again after the designer and the singer teamed up for Versace’s spring-summer 2020 show in Milan. For the event, Marc Anthony’s ex-wife and Ben Affleck’s soon-to-be-wife wore a revamp featuring the same memorable green palm trees print.
During Vogue’s Forces of Fashion conference, the designer sat down with Anna Wintour and revealed how she and JLo dreamed up the surprise moment.
“We were sitting together at the table. I took a look at her, and she looked so gorgeous, and she was so sweet, and she hasn’t changed a bit since the first time,” Donatella told Anna. “And I said, ‘Would you do it again, Jennifer?’ And she said, ‘Why not, let me check my schedule.’ That happened in like two seconds.”
She continued by praising the entertainer. “This is what I like about her. She’s very instinctive. She doesn’t have to ask too many managers what to do,” she explained. “Then she came [to Milan], and everything was undercover. Nobody knew she was going to do that.”
