Remember that green Versace dress Jennifer Lopez wore to the Grammys back in 2000? 20 years later, she’s rocking an almost identical one for Donatella Versace’s show at Milan Fashion Week. And just like the first time around, Jenny from the block has left us all with our jaws on the floor.
But it turns out the most fascinating thing about her iconic outfit goes beyond the way she looks in it – It turns out, JLo’s 2000 Grammy’s dress was the most Googled search query at the time, and it inspired the internet giant to create Google Images!
Yep – there was a time when we could only search for text on Google, not pictures.
As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains on Project Syndicate in 2015, “people wanted more than just text. 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.”
Of course, the Google Image search engine didn’t happen overnight. But it did happen in July 2001, thanks to engineer Huican Zhu and the current CEO of YouTube Susan Wojcicki who built it together.
Fast forward to today’s Versace show and Donatella is making sure we don’t forget the impact of the dress on culture and technology. A Google image search field flashed across the runway screen with the words “Okay Google, show me the Versace jungle dress,” with images of the original look popping up. Then came the words, “Okay Google, show me the real Versace jungle dress,” at which point JLo appeared and owned the dress like it was still the year 2000.
