To celebrate the anniversary of Google image search, italian fashion house Versace has partnered with the tech giant to recreate the ‘jungle print’ green dress worn by jennifer lopez in 2000. after lopez had worn the look to the grammy awards, it became a fashion legend, as well as the most popular search query google had seen at the time. ‘but back in 2000, search results were still just a list of blue links,’ reads a post on google’s blog. ‘when the search team realized they weren’t able to directly surface the results that people wanted—a picture of jennifer in the dress—they were inspired to create google images.’
At Milan fashion week, google reunited with Donatella Versace to show off a new, revamped green dress in the print, modeled by lopez at the end of the brand’s spring-summer 2020 show. the blog notes that the company’s VR painting app, tilt brush, ‘helped decorate the runway space with digital artwork inspired by the new print.’ the google assistant was also on after donatella versace seemingly used the voice-activated AI helper to pull up photos of j.lo in the original design.
video by vogue
former CEO eric schmidt wrote in 2015 about the number of search results they received following lopez’s appearance at the music award show, noting that users wanted ‘more than just text’: ‘at the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen,’ schmidt wrote. ‘but we had no sure-fire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: jlo wearing that dress. google image search was born.
‘no one predicted that the jungle print dress would have the technological impact that it did—not even j. lo herself,’ google’s blog post continues. ‘eighteen years later, google images is used by millions of people every day, not just to look for celebrity style or fashion photos, but to find ideas for redesigning a living room, creating a meal, or embarking on a diy project.’
the entire versace runway show can be watched on youtube.
