How Jennifer Lopez’s Versace Dress Created Google Images

On Friday, Donatella Versace showed her Spring 2020 womenswear collection, based around a green, leaf-print dress that Jennifer Lopez infamously wore to the Grammys in 2000, with a runway show celebrating the oft-repeated tale that the dress led to the creation of Google’s image search function. At the end of the show, The Cut reports, a Google image search field flashed on a screen with the command, “Okay Google, show me the Versace jungle dress,” followed by images of the original look from 2000. Then came the command, “Okay Google, show me the real Versace jungle dress,” and J. Lo herself appeared, bringing internet history to life.

That the dress, which was at once a flowing bohemian chiffon gown and barely there, led Google to create one of its most popular features, is one of fashion’s favorite stories, a testament to the immeasurable impact of an industry sometimes considered superfluous. As former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt wrote 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.”

But was it really so simple? Did Jennifer Lopez really create a whole new way to look at the internet? According to Cathy Edwards, director of engineering and product for Google Images, it wasn’t overnight, but Lopez was definitely the impetus. “It is completely true,” Edwards said in a Google hangout Friday afternoon, “but it is also not the case that this happened and the next day we said, Oh, we should build an image search engine!” At that point, she noted, the company was only two years old, with a very small number of employees, “and everyone there at the time was like, Of course we need to build an image search engine, but they weren’t sure how much priority to give it.” When the Lopez dress moment happened, in February 2000, “it became so clear that this was important, but they didn’t have anyone to do it.”

Later that summer, Google hired a recent college graduate, Huican Zhu, as an engineer, and partnered him with Susan Wojcicki, the current CEO of YouTube, who was then a product manager. They worked together to build it, “and single handedly, almost, launched it in July 2001.”

Versace’s Google cred may assert its own role in popular culture and technology, as the show’s theme insists—but it also demonstrates how much Google’s focus on organizing image-driven information, in addition to text, has changed the fashion industry in particular over the past two decades. Suddenly, the output of an incredibly expensive European fashion brand was something the whole world could see, again and again. “It really just reflects how infinite, accessible information has really changed the world,” Edwards said. Previously, “very, very few people [were] able to really experience a fashion show, and then maybe there was some dissemination, but you had to buy a magazine, right? And you had to be the right magazine that had this dress in it. [Then] suddenly, anyone, any time, can do these queries.”

The dress has in fact become a sort of evergreen search for Google. Almost twenty years later, “People are still doing queries for ‘Jennifer Lopez green dress,’ ‘Jennifer Lopez jungle print dress,’ ‘Jennifer Lopez Grammys dress,’ [that] sort of thing,” Edwards said. Which has also allowed for fashion to indulge in its current obsession with nostalgia, a huge shift from its previous obsession with what’s new and next. As for whether Google anticipated this level of impact when creating the product, Edwards, who joined Google in 2016, said, “I think they knew that information was extraordinarily powerful, and that democratizing information in this way, organizing it and making it useful, making it accessible, was going to be powerful. But I think it’s hard to predict this level of impact that search, and the Internet and Google has had on the world. I think everyone’s a bit surprised by that.”

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