The green, silk chiffon dress Jennifer Lopez wore to the 42nd Grammy Awards in 2000 often gets credit for boosting the career of designer Donatella Versace and turning her fashion company into a household name, and fifteen years later, the dress is getting credit for the creation of Google Images. According to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, the public’s intense desire to see Lopez’s controversial yet stunning outfit prompted the company to launch the revolutionary Images feature.
At the time of the 42nd Grammy Awards in 2000, Google was a simple text-only search engine with no built-in option for looking through images.
“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… It was better than anything else, but not great by today’s standards,” Schmidt told Project Syndicate, which is putting together a piece on the search engine.
Once the company noticed how many users were searching for pictures of Lopez’s dress, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin got to work on Google Images.
“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,” said Schmidt. “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.”
The iconic see-through green Versace dress had a tropical leaf and bamboo pattern, with a citrine-studded crotch and a low-cut neck that extended below her navel. In a 2008 poll published in the Daily Telegraph, readers voted it the fifth most iconic dress of all time. After Lopez admitted to Harper’s Bazaar in 2012 that she doesn’t know if she likes the dress enough to wear it in the house, let alone on another red carpet, the American Idol judge decided to put it on display at The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles.
