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Jennifer Lopez says her stylist pleaded with her not to wear the iconic green Versace dress to the 2000 Grammy Awards

Amanda Goh   

Jennifer Lopez says her stylist pleaded with her not to wear the iconic green Versace dress to the 2000 Grammy Awards
  • Jennifer Lopez says her stylist pleaded with her not to wear the iconic Versace dress to the 2000 Grammys.
  • The singer revealed in a Vogue interview how she nearly missed out on that fashion moment.

It's the year 2000. Velour tracksuits and low-rise jeans are in trend, and Jennifer Lopez just caused a stir while walking the red carpet at the Grammy Awards in a flowy, green jungle-print Versace gown.

The jungle-print dress, with a plunging neckline and thigh-high slit, was one for the history books — and yet, it almost didn't have its moment.

In a new interview with Vogue, Lopez revealed that her then-stylist, Andrea Lieberman, pleaded with her not to wear the dress to the awards.

"It was a dress that other people had worn already," Lopez said during the Vogue interview. "My stylist was like, 'Please don't wear it. Somebody else has worn it.'"

But the musician thought the dress looked great and decided to go ahead with it anyway.

"I was like, 'Well, you bought it, and it looks the best, so I'm going to wear it.' And so I did. And it caused quite a stir," Lopez said.

The singer then compared her Versace gown to Marilyn Monroe's white halter dress from "The Seven Year Itch."

"I guess every generation needs its iconic kind of Marilyn dress, and this is that dress for this generation," Lopez said. "Why it became that? It was just a moment when the wind blew open, and I walked out onto the stage, and it just kinda happened."

That night, Lopez walked the red carpet with Sean "Diddy" Combs and earned her first Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording.

In 2017, she told Entertainment Tonight's Carly Steel that she felt people stirring when she stepped on the red carpet.

"It was a weird feeling," Lopez said. "I was like, 'What's happening?' And my dress was happening and I didn't know it."

Indeed, the singer was not the first person to wear the dress.

The semi-sheer number was revealed at the Versace spring-summer runway show during Milan Fashion Week in October 1999, where it was worn by model Amber Valletta.

In December 1999, Donatella Versace herself wore the gown to the Rock Style Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

In January 2000, about a month before the Grammys, Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls wore the dress to the 1st Annual NRJ Music Awards in Cannes, France.

Even though Lopez wasn't the first to wear the dress, she was the one who made it iconic — so much so that Google Image Search was created as a result.

In January 2015, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in an article for Project Syndicate saying that Lopez's green dress moment inspired the Google founders to create Google Image Search.

"After all, 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," Schmidt wrote. "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."



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