The dress

The dress was a 2015 online viral phenomenon centred on a photograph of a dress. Viewers disagreed on whether the dress was blue and black, or white and gold. The phenomenon revealed differences in human colour perception and became the subject of scientific investigations into neuroscience and vision science.

This article is about the viral phenomenon. For other uses, see The Dress.

Washed-out colour photograph of a lace dress
The original photograph of the dress

The phenomenon originated in a photograph of a dress posted on the social networking service Facebook. The dress was black and blue, but the conditions of the photograph caused many to perceive it as white and gold, creating debate. Within a week, more than ten million tweets had mentioned the dress. The retailer of the dress, Roman Originals, reported a surge in sales and produced a one-off version in white and gold sold for charity.

Origin

In February 2015, about a week before the wedding of Grace and Keir Johnston, of Colonsay, Scotland, the bride's mother, Cecilia Bleasdale, took a photograph of a dress at Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet north of Chester, England. Bleasdale intended to wear the dress at the wedding and sent the photograph to Grace. The dress was coloured blue with black lace. However, Grace told her mother she perceived it in the photograph as white with gold lace.[1]

After Grace posted the photograph on Facebook, her friends also disagreed; some saw it as white with gold, while others saw it as blue with black.[2][3] For a week, the debate became well known in Colonsay, a small island community.[4]

On the day of the wedding, Caitlin McNeill, a friend of the bride and groom, performed with her band at the wedding. Even after seeing that the dress was "obviously blue and black" in reality,[3] the musicians remained preoccupied by the photograph. They said they almost failed to make it on stage because they were caught up discussing the dress. A few days later, on 26 February, McNeill reposted the image to her blog on Tumblr, creating further public discussion surrounding the image.[2][3]

Response

Initial viral spread

The most interesting thing to me is that it traveled. It went from New York media circle-jerk Twitter to international. And you could see it in my Twitter notifications because people started having conversations in, like, Spanish and Portuguese and then Japanese and Chinese and Thai and Arabic. It was amazing to watch this move from a local thing to, like, a massive international phenomenon.

Cates Holderness[5]

Cates Holderness, who ran the Tumblr page for BuzzFeed at the site's New York offices, received a message from McNeill asking for help resolving the colour dispute of the dress. She dismissed it, but checked the page near the end of her workday and saw that it had received around 5,000 notes, a large amount for Tumblr. Tom Christ, Tumblr's director of data, said at its peak the page was receiving 14,000 views a second (or 840,000 views per minute), well over the normal rates. Later that night, the number of notes increased tenfold.[5]

Holderness showed the picture to other members of the BuzzFeed social media team, who immediately began arguing about the dress colours. She created a simple poll for Tumblr users, then left work and took the subway home. When she got off the train and checked her phone, it was overwhelmed by messages. That evening, the page set a new record at BuzzFeed for concurrent visitors, and eventually peaked at 673,000.[5][6]

The image became a worldwide Internet meme across social media. On Twitter, users created the hashtags "#whiteandgold", "#blueandblack", and "#dressgate" to discuss their opinions on what the colour of the dress was, and theories surrounding their arguments.[7] The number of tweets about the dress increased throughout the night; at 11:36 pm GMT, when the first increase in the number of tweets about the dress occurred, there were five thousand tweets per minute using the hashtag "#TheDress", increasing to 11,000 tweets per minute with the hashtag by 1:31 am GMT.[5] The photo also attracted discussion relating to the triviality of the matter as a whole; The Washington Post described the dispute as "[the] drama that divided a planet".[2][8][9] Some articles humorously suggested that the dress could prompt an existential crisis over the nature of sight and reality, or that the debate could harm interpersonal relationships.[2][10] Others examined why people were making such a big argument over a seemingly trivial matter.[11]

Overnight popularity

On the evening BuzzFeed posted the article, the Wellesley College neuroscientist Bevil Conway gave some comments about the phenomenon to the Wired reporter Adam Rogers. Before they hung up, Rogers warned him, "Your tomorrow will not be the same." Conway thought he was exaggerating. Rogers's story eventually received 32.8 million unique visitors. When Conway woke up the next morning, his inbox had so many emails he initially thought it had been hacked, until he saw that most were interview requests from major media organisations. "I did 10 interviews and had to have a colleague take my class that day," said Conway.[5]

Celebrities with larger Twitter followings began to comment. A tweet by the American songwriter Taylor Swift's tweet, in which she saw the dress as blue and black and said she was "confused and scared"—was retweeted 111,134 times and liked 154,188 times.[5] Jaden Smith, Frankie Muniz, Demi Lovato, Mindy Kaling, and Justin Bieber saw the dress was blue and black, while Anna Kendrick, B. J. Novak, Katy Perry, Julianne Moore, and Sarah Hyland saw it as white and gold.[12] Kim Kardashian tweeted that she saw it as white and gold, while her then-husband Kanye West saw it as blue and black. Lucy Hale, Phoebe Tonkin, and Katie Nolan saw different colour schemes at different times. Lady Gaga described the dress as "periwinkle and sand", while David Duchovny called it teal. Other celebrities, including Ellen DeGeneres and Ariana Grande, mentioned the dress on social media without mentioning specific colours.[13][14][15][16][17] Politicians, government agencies and social media platforms of major brands also wrote humorous posts.[18] Ultimately, the dress was the subject of 4.4 million tweets within 24 hours.[5]

The dress was designed and manufactured by Roman Originals.[19] In the UK, where the phenomenon had begun, Ian Johnson, creative manager for Roman Originals, learned of the controversy from his Facebook news feed that morning. "I was pretty gobsmacked. I just laughed and told the wife that I'd better get to work," he said.[5] TV presenter Alex Jones wore the dress on that night's edition of The One Show.[20]

We've seen other stories go viral, but the sheer diversity of outlets that picked it up and were talking about it was unlike anything we had ever seen. Everyone from QVC to Warner Bros. to local public libraries to Red Cross affiliates were all posting links to it on their social accounts. That kind of diversity in who's sharing a story pretty much never happens ... and certainly never to that degree. Even in the year since and with a million different people trying to replicate it, nothing has come close.[5]

Brandon Silverman, CEO of social media monitoring site CrowdTangle

Businesses that had nothing to do with the dress, or even the clothing industry, devoted social media attention to the phenomenon. Adobe retweeted another Twitter user who had used some of the company's apps to isolate the dress's colours. "We jumped in the conversation and thought, Let's see what happens," recalled Karen Do, the company's senior manager for social media. Jenna Bromberg, a digital brand manager for Pizza Hut, saw the dress as white and gold and quickly sent out a tweet with a picture of pizza noting that it, too, was the same colours. Do called it "literally a tweet heard around the world".[5]

Ben Fischer of the New York Business Journal reported that interest in the first BuzzFeed article about the dress exhibited vertical growth instead of the typical bell curve of a viral phenomenon, leading BuzzFeed to assign two editorial teams to generate additional articles about the dress to drive ad revenue,[21] and, by 1 March, the original BuzzFeed article had received over 37 million views.[22] The dress was cited by CNN commentator Mel Robbins as a viral phenomenon having the requisite qualities of positivity bias incorporating "awe, laughter and amusement" and was compared to and contrasted with a story about escaped llamas in an Arizona retirement community earlier that day, as well as to tributes paid to actor Leonard Nimoy after his death the following day.[23]

Real colours of dress confirmed

The dress was confirmed as a royal blue "Lace Bodycon Dress" from the retailer, Roman Originals.[24] The dress is black and blue;[25][26] although it was available in three other colours (red, pink, and ivory, each with black lace), a white and gold version was not available at the time. The day after McNeill's post, Roman Originals' website experienced a major surge in traffic and sold out of the dress within 30 minutes.[27] On 28 February, Roman Originals announced that they would make a single white and gold dress for a Comic Relief charity auction.[28]

On 3 March, the Johnstons, Bleasdale, and MacNeill appeared as guests on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in the United States. The presenter, Ellen DeGeneres, presented each of them with gifts of underwear patterned after the dress and combining both colour schemes. The show sponsors also gave the Johnstons a gift of $10,000 and a honeymoon trip to Grenada, as they had left their honeymoon early to participate in the show.[4]

By 1 March, over two thirds of BuzzFeed users polled responded that the dress was white and gold.[29] Some people have suggested that the dress changes colours on its own.[2] Media outlets noted that the photo was overexposed and had poor white balance, causing its colours to be washed out, giving rise to the perception by some that the dress is white and gold.[2][30]

Scientific explanations
Two ways in which the photograph of the dress may be perceived:
  • blue and black under a yellow-tinted illumination (left figure) or
  • white and gold under a blue-tinted illumination (right figure).

There is no consensus on why the dress elicits such discordant perceptions.[31] The neuroscientists Bevil Conway and Jay Neitz believe they are a result of how the human brain perceives colour and chromatic adaptation. Conway believes it is connected to how the brain processes the various hues of a daylight sky: "Your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis ... people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black."[32][33] Neitz said:

Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance ... but I've studied individual differences in colour vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I've ever seen.[32]

Similar theories have been expounded by the University of Liverpool's Paul Knox, who stated that what the brain interprets as colour may be affected by the device the photograph is viewed on, or the viewer's own expectations.[34] Anya Hurlbert and collaborators also considered the problem from the perspective of colour perception. They attributed the differences in perception to individual perception of colour constancy.[35][36]

The neuroscientist and psychologist Pascal Wallisch states that while inherently ambiguous stimuli have been known to vision science for many years, this is the first such stimulus in the colour domain that was brought to the attention of science by social media. He attributes differential perceptions to differences in illumination and fabric priors, but also notes that the stimulus is highly unusual insofar as the perception of most people does not switch. If it does, it does so only on very long time scales, which is highly unusual for bistable stimuli, so perceptual learning might be at play.[37][38] In addition, he says that discussions of this stimulus are not frivolous, as the stimulus is both of interest to science and a paradigmatic case of how different people can sincerely see the world differently.[39] Daniel Hardiman-McCartney of the College of Optometrists stated that the picture was ambiguous, suggesting that the illusion was caused by a strong yellow light shining onto the dress, and human perception of the colours of the dress and light source by comparing them with other colours and objects in the picture.[40] The philosopher Barry C. Smith compared the phenomenon with Ludwig Wittgenstein and the rabbit–duck illusion,[41] although the rabbit-duck illusion is an ambiguous image where, for most people, the alternative perceptions switch very easily.

The Journal of Vision, a scientific journal about vision research, announced in March 2015 that a special issue about the dress would be published with the title A Dress Rehearsal for Vision Science.[42][43] The first large-scale scientific study on the dress was published in Current Biology three months after the image went viral. The study, which involved 1,400 respondents, found that 57 per cent saw the dress as blue and black, 30 per cent saw it as white and gold, 11 per cent saw it as blue and brown, and two per cent reported it as "other".[44] Women and older people disproportionately saw the dress as white and gold. The researchers further found that if the dress was shown in artificial yellow-coloured lighting almost all respondents saw the dress as black and blue, while they saw it as white and gold if the simulated lighting had a blue bias.[33][44][45][46] Another study in the Journal of Vision, by Pascal Wallisch, found that people who were early risers were more likely to think the dress was lit by natural light, perceiving it as white and gold, and that "night owls" saw the dress as blue and black.[47][48]

A study carried out by Schlaffke et al. reported that individuals who saw the dress as white and gold showed increased activity in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain. These areas are thought to be critical in higher cognition activities such as top-down modulation in visual perception.[49][50]

Legacy

The dress was included on multiple year-end lists of notable Internet memes in 2015.[51][52] As the original authors of the photograph that sparked the viral phenomenon, Bleasdale and her partner Paul Jinks later expressed frustration and regret over being "completely left out from the story", including their lack of control over the story, the omission of their role in the discovery, and the commercial use of the photograph.[6] In South Africa, the Salvation Army used the dress in a 2015 campaign to raise awareness of domestic violence, with the slogan: "Why is it so hard to see black and blue?"[53] In July 2023, Keir Johnston was charged with the attempted murder of his wife, Grace, following years of domestic violence and threats.[54]

See also

References
  1. Benedictus, Leo (22 December 2015). "#Thedress: 'It's been quite stressful having to deal with it ... we had a falling-out'". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 11 December 2019. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
  2. "The inside story of the 'white dress, blue dress' drama that divided a planet". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 12 July 2018. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  3. "The Dress Is Blue And Black, Says The Girl Who Saw It in Person". BuzzFeed. Archived from the original on 30 May 2018. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  4. "Ellen DeGeneres Settles the Great Dress Debate Once and For All!". Entertainment Tonight. Archived from the original on 30 March 2016. Retrieved 20 March 2016.
  5. Warzel, Charlie (26 February 2016). "2/26: The Oral History". BuzzFeed. Archived from the original on 19 March 2018. Retrieved 28 February 2016.
  6. "#TheDress couple: 'we were completely left out from the story'". BBC News. 1 January 2016. Archived from the original on 6 January 2016. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
  7. Klassen, Anna (26 February 2015). "What Colors Are This Dress? White & Gold or Black & Blue? The Internet Is Going Insane Trying To Find Out – PHOTO". Bustle. Archived from the original on 21 August 2017. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  8. "Color Bind: This Dress is White and Gold, Right?". Boston Globe. Archived from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  9. "The Official Live Blog: Is This Dress Blue and Black or White and Gold?". Slate. 27 February 2015. Archived from the original on 15 October 2018. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  10. King, Kirsten (26 February 2015). "This Dress Is Ruining People's Lives". BuzzFeed. Archived from the original on 30 May 2018. Retrieved 1 March 2015.
  11. "Why do we care about the colour of the dress?". The Guardian. 27 February 2015. Archived from the original on 21 August 2017. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
  12. "What Colors Are This Dress? Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and a Bajillion Other Celebs Weigh In". MTV News. Archived from the original on 1 April 2015. Retrieved 30 March 2015.
  13. "#Dressgate: The white and gold dress making our mind work until it's black and blue". The Sydney Morning Herald. 27 February 2015. Archived from the original on 26 August 2017. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  14. Iyengar, Rishi. "The Dress That Broke the Internet, and the Woman Who Started It All". Archived from the original on 16 October 2017. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  15. Sanchez, Josh (26 February 2015). "'What color is this dress' confused celebrities, too". Fansided.com. Archived from the original on 27 February 2015. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  16. Mahler, Jonathan (27 February 2015). "A White and Gold Dress Overloads the Internet". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 18 May 2018. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  17. Iyengar, Rishi (26 February 2015). "Taylor Swift Says The Dress is Black and Blue". Time. Archived from the original on 13 September 2017. Retrieved 1 March 2015.
  18. Jim Dalrymple II. "Politicians, Police, And Brands Have Weighed in On 'The Dress'". Buzzfeed.com. Archived from the original on 20 November 2017. Retrieved 6 March 2015.
  19. Grant, Katie (30 October 2015). "The Dress: Roman Originals co-founder Peter Christodoulou on how viral image left company sitting pretty". The Independent. Archived from the original on 21 May 2018. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  20. Forrester, Katy (28 February 2015). "Watch Alex Jones rock #TheDress on The One Show as debate rumbles on over its colour". Daily Record. Archived from the original on 17 April 2021. Retrieved 25 August 2021.
  21. Fischer, Ben (27 February 2015). "The Dress phenomenon didn't happen by accident. It took big money". New York Business Journal. American City Business Journals. Archived from the original on 6 March 2017. Retrieved 1 March 2015.
  22. Holderness, Cates (26 February 2015). "What Colors Are This Dress?". BuzzFeed. Archived from the original on 23 April 2018. Retrieved 1 March 2015.
  23. Robbins, Mel (28 February 2015). "Why blue/black/white/gold dress went viral". CNN. Archived from the original on 16 May 2018. Retrieved 3 March 2015.
  24. "Lace Detail Bodycon Dress". Archived from the original on 27 February 2015. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  25. "The blue and black (or white and gold) dress: Actual color, brand, and price details revealed". The Independent. 27 February 2015. Archived from the original on 13 July 2019. Retrieved 10 May 2015.
  26. "Optical illusion: Dress color debate goes global". BBC News. BBC. Archived from the original on 13 July 2019. Retrieved 28 February 2015.
  27. "'The Dress' flying off racks following Internet sensation: 'We sold out in the first 30 minutes of our business day'". Daily News. New York. Archived from the original on 21 May 2018. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  28. "'The Dress' returns in special edition gold and white version for Comic Relief charity auction". The Independent. 10 March 2015. Archived from the original on 29 September 2017. Retrieved 10 March 2015.
  29. Holderness, Cates (26 February 2015). "What Colors Are This Dress?". Buzzfeed. Archived from the original on 23 April 2018. Retrieved 1 March 2015.
  30. "Why that dress looks white and gold: It's overexposed". Mashable. 27 February 2015. Archived from the original on 20 April 2018. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  31. González Martín-Moro, J.; Prieto Garrido, F.; Gómez Sanz, F.; Fuentes Vega, I.; Castro Rebollo, M.; Moreno Martín, P. (April 2018). "Which are the colours of the dress? Review of an atypical optic illusion". Archivos de la Sociedad Española de Oftalmología (English Edition). 93 (4): 186–192. doi:10.1016/j.oftale.2018.02.003.
  32. "The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Colour of This Dress". Wired. 27 February 2015. Archived from the original on 28 February 2015. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  33. Sample, Ian (14 May 2015). "#TheDress: have researchers solved the mystery of its colour?". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 28 November 2016. Retrieved 13 December 2016.
  34. "Viewpoint: Blue and black or white and gold?". News.liv.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 2 March 2015. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
  35. Hurlbert, Anya; Aston, Stacey (2017). "What #theDress reveals about the role of illumination priors in colour perception and colour constancy". Journal of Vision. 17 (7): 4. doi:10.1167/17.9.4. PMC 5812438. PMID 28793353. Archived from the original on 13 August 2020. Retrieved 25 August 2020.
  36. Brainard, DH; Hulbert, A (2015). "Colour Vision: Understanding #TheDress". Current Biology. 25 (13): R551–R554. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.05.020. PMID 26126278. Archived from the original on 4 December 2020. Retrieved 25 August 2020.
  37. "An experts lesson from the dress". Slate. 2 March 2015. Archived from the original on 20 April 2018. Retrieved 6 March 2015.
  38. McRaney, David (24 June 2022). "How 'The Dress' Sparked a Neuroscience Breakthrough". Wired. Retrieved 24 June 2022.
  39. "Why discussing the dress is not frivolous". pascallisch.net. 2 March 2015. Archived from the original on 3 March 2015. Retrieved 6 March 2015.
  40. Hardiman-McCartney, Daniel (2 March 2015). "#Thedress and your optometrist – the scientific voice of reason". College of Optometrists. Archived from the original on 7 March 2017. Retrieved 6 March 2017.
  41. "What would Wittgenstein say about that dress?". BBC. 27 February 2015. Archived from the original on 9 March 2015. Retrieved 6 March 2015.
  42. "Journal of Vision – Special Issue on The Dress". 12 March 2015. Archived from the original on 9 May 2015. Retrieved 10 May 2015.
  43. "- JOV - ARVO Journals - JOV - ARVO Journals". jov.arvojournals.org. Archived from the original on 1 April 2018. Retrieved 1 April 2018.
  44. Lafer-Sousa, Rosa; Hermann, Katherine L.; Conway, Bevil R. (29 June 2015). "Striking individual differences in color perception uncovered by 'the dress' photograph". Current Biology. 25 (13): R545–R546. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.04.053. PMC 4921196. PMID 25981795.
  45. Gegenfurtner, Karl R.; Bloj, Marina; Toscani, Matteo (29 June 2015). "The many colours of 'the dress'". Current Biology. 25 (13): R543–R544. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.04.043. PMID 25981790.
  46. Winkler, Alissa D.; Spillmann, Lothar; Werner, John S.; Webster, Michael A. (29 June 2015). "Asymmetries in blue–yellow colour perception and in the colour of 'the dress'". Current Biology. 25 (13): R547–R548. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.05.004. PMC 4489998. PMID 25981792.
  47. Wallisch, Pascal (7 April 2017). "Illumination assumptions account for individual differences in the perceptual interpretation of a profoundly ambiguous stimulus in the color domain: 'The dress'". Journal of Vision. 17 (4): 5. doi:10.1167/17.4.5. PMID 28388701.
  48. Wallisch, Pascal (12 April 2017). "Two Years Later, We Finally Know Why People Saw 'The Dress' Differently". Slate. Archived from the original on 16 January 2018. Retrieved 3 March 2018.
  49. Knapton, Sarah (15 March 2016). "Dressgate: If you saw THAT dress as white your brain was working overtime". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 2 April 2018. Retrieved 1 April 2018.
  50. Schlaffke, Lara; Golisch, Anne; Haag, Lauren M.; Lenz, Melanie; Heba, Stefanie; Lissek, Silke; Schmidt-Wilcke, Tobias; Eysel, Ulf T.; Tegenthoff, Martin (December 2015). "The brain's dress code: How The Dress allows to decode the neuronal pathway of an optical illusion". Cortex. Elsevier BV. 73: 271–275. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.08.017. ISSN 0010-9452. PMID 26478963. S2CID 25188324.
  51. "The 15 Best Memes of 2015". Entertainment Weekly's EW.com. Archived from the original on 14 March 2016. Retrieved 20 March 2016.
  52. "24 Memes That Took The Internet By Storm in 2015". MTV News. Archived from the original on 2 April 2016. Retrieved 20 March 2016.
  53. "Salvation Army uses The Dress in ad targeting violence against women". CBC News. 6 March 2015. Archived from the original on 2 February 2018. Retrieved 25 March 2015.
  54. Grierson, Jamie (14 July 2023). "Man whose mother-in-law's blue and black dress went viral charged with trying to kill wife". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 18 July 2023.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to The dress.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.