Like many, Jennifer Lopez wore a dress on the Grammys red carpet in the year 2000. Unlike many, this dress, all green and open down to her belly button, would be seared in the collective conscious of a generation. These days, she’s a real renaissance woman who looks back with the rest of us on her singer-dancer days, and she wore the Versace gown again on the runway in September, as the gown’s 20-year anniversary approached. She looked practically the same, and the dress had the same effect: instant viral-ity.
I wonder if the dress would have been so memorable if it didn’t appear on that singer on that red carpet in that year, the new millennium, when everything felt a little heightened. We had just made it by the skin of our teeth into another thousand years. In a post-Y2K, pre-9/11 world, Rosie O’Donnell hosted. Ricky Martin and Ibrahim Ferrer of Buena Vista Social Club performed. America had yet to do the Dixie Chicks dirty. Destiny’s Child was still a group, and a group of four at that. Christina Aguilera beat Britney Spears for the title of best new artist. Awards shows always double as time capsules, but the 2000 Grammys maybe more so.
Now that fashion has veered from restrained clean lines into wonderfully bad taste again, we can cast our gaze backwards and wonder if we had it all right back then after all. The fur shrugs, the unchecked lean into sequins and leather. Boy bands and girl groups dressed in complementary colors. Lopez as Botticelli’s Venus in a tropical print. Come now, let’s look back at what we talk about when we talk about Y2k fashion.