We are loving Jennifer Lopez's revamped YouTube channel SO much! She recently launched a new series called Moments of Fashion on her channel and the first episode is fire. It's all about that green jungle-print Versace dress that she wore to the 2000 Grammy Awards and the story behind how she ended up wearing it even though her stylist didn't want her to.
More from MamásLatinas: All the times Jennifer Lopez's outfits beat out other celebs that tried to copy her
You know the dress she's talking about! It's the one that plunged down so far you couldn't even say it had a neckline because necks don't go all the way down past your belly button. That dress literally stole the show. It made more headlines than anyone who won an actual Grammy and you could even say that Jennifer and that dress are the reason that Google Images was invented.
To refresh your memory, here is Jennifer in THE DRESS.
No one could take their eyes off of Jen in this dress. Partly because everyone was waiting for a wardrobe malfunction, which never happened. Jennifer says, “There was never any danger of that. I was so securely stuck into that thing that there was gonna be no mishaps.”
Jennifer wasn't even the first person to wear that dress.
In fact, Jennifer's stylist Andrea Lieberman didn't want Jennifer to wear the dress because it had already been worn by others. Here is Donatella Versace herself wearing the now infamous dress at the 1999 Gala at the Met. As you can see, Donatella opted for a bare-armed look.
What happened was that Jennifer had been crazy busy filming The Wedding Planner and the when the Grammys crept up on her, she only had few dresses to choose from. "Usually if you come to a fitting of mine, there’s, like, tons of dresses," says Jennifer. "There’s always so many choices. But this day, we really had a choice between two dresses. One was kind of like a white dress, and the other was the Versace jungle-print dress."
Former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell wore it before Jennifer, too.
Check out Ginger Spice rockin' the same dress at the NRJ Music Awards in Cannes, France in January 2000, a month before the Grammys. How is it that the same dress that looked so revealing on J.Lo looks so much more demure in this picture?
Even though her stylist was against the dress, Jennifer ended up wearing it because when she tried it on in front of Benny Medina–her longtime manager and godparent to her twins–said, "That’s it. That’s it. Don’t even talk about it. That’s the dress."
Santana got less attention than that dress.
That night, Santana won eight Grammys, but the next day all anyone could talk about was Jennifer Lopez in that green dress. "I was like, this man just broke records but people want to know about this dress!" Jen says in her video. "It was the craziest thing. But it just goes to show you the power of fashion."
But there's even more to the story.
You can watch the whole video to hear Jennifer tell it, but basically, she and that dress are the reason that Google came out with Google Images. People searched for that image so much that Google was like, "Hmmm, perhaps we could do with an image search." Nice! Add tech innovator to Jennifer's list of accomplishments.
