JLo demands – Jennifer Lopez says she’s owed compensation after her green Versace dress at the 2000 Grammys helped spark the popularity of Google Images—an idea she ties to comments from Eric Schmidt, then Google’s executive chairman.
Jennifer Lopez doesn’t sound bitter—just amused, and a little insistent.
In a June 5 episode of the “SubwayTakes Uncut” podcast, the 56-year-old performer said she “absolutely” believes she should be compensated for inspiring Google Images, pointing to the moment she “literally broke the internet” with the green Versace dress she wore to the 2000 Grammy Awards.
“I feel like they owe me a check,” Lopez said. “I feel like, you know, something. They should have done that just for like, just for karma, for good. You know what I mean? Cuz they’re probably trillionaires or whatever.”
That claim traces back to a January 2015 blog post by Eric Schmidt, then Google’s executive chairman. In that post, he confirmed the dress’s online impact by writing that it was the “most popular search query we had ever seen.”
The story has kept moving long after the Grammys night it started on. From Spice Girls’ Geri Halliwell-Horner to Donatella Versace herself, celebrities including Lopez have worn the exact look—or “tasteful dupes”—in the decades since Versace’s Fall 1999 campaign and Spring/Summer 2000 show.
Lopez said her ongoing association with the dress even stretches into today’s pop culture cycle. Mike Abdalla, star of the Amazon Prime series “Off Campus,” is the latest celeb to rock the garment, and Lopez pointed directly at the search behavior behind its comeback.
“And that dress has just come back into the zeitgeist again with ‘Off Campus’ and ‘On The Floor,’” Lopez said. “Oh, this is (expletive) crazy. So, yes, I wore the Versace dress. Because people searched for it, they invented Google Images.”
Her stylist, Andrea Lieberman, had advised against it. Lopez said Lieberman told her it wouldn’t be a “good move” because multiple stars had already worn the dress. Lopez didn’t follow that advice.
She recalled a fitting session for her Grammys dress on the set of “The Wedding Planner” in 2000, saying she wasn’t in love with any of the dresses she tried on. So she asked Lieberman to bring more options. When she tried on the green one, Lopez said the room’s reaction made the choice clear.
“I tried on the green one and when I came out … everybody was like ‘That’s the dress! That is the dress, that’s what you’re wearing. Let’s go,’” Lopez said in a September 2019 interview with Vogue.
Despite Lieberman’s dissent, Lopez said she stood her ground.
“I said, ‘This is what we’re going to wear,’” she recalled. “I didn’t think it was all that risque, to be honest. I was more excited that it was the Grammys. I wasn’t really even thinking about the dress that much. I was just glad I had something to wear.”
She remembered the buzz that followed that night—on the red carpet and the Grammys stage alike. The dress, she said, was taped down, but it became part of the public imagination anyway.
“It’s nothing. It was all taped down. But that was the moment that kind of captured people’s imaginations, I think,” Lopez said. “In terms of my career, this dress really marked a moment in time. (Even if) you don’t know my music. and you don’t know my movies. people know about that moment and that dress. That was it.”.
What ties the different pieces together is simple: the dress didn’t just create headlines in 2000—it set off search behavior that. years later. Lopez still believes deserves a direct payoff. With Schmidt’s January 2015 statement placing the moment in Google’s own history. her joke about a check lands less like a throwaway and more like a demand built on a very specific memory.
Jennifer Lopez Google Images Eric Schmidt Versace dress 2000 Grammys SubwayTakes Uncut podcast pop culture celebrity fashion