#TheDress one year on – eight things we learned from the viral phenomenon

It was #TheDress to end all dresses.

It began as someone attempting to find a dress to wear to a wedding, and ended in millions of tweets, countless articles and even a copyright dispute. This time last year, everyone on the internet, on TV and in newspapers was arguing about the colour of a lace bodycon dress. From Tumblr, to Twitter, to BuzzFeed and beyond: #TheDress was everywhere.

But what is a viral meme if not a lesson for us all? A year on, here’s what we took from it all:

1. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if it’s ‘not news’

Pre viral journalism, #TheDress would have stayed in its corner of Tumblr and weird Twitter as a curious oddity. Imagine going to an editor in a traditional newsroom pre-dress and trying to explain to them people on the internet couldn’t decide what colour this dress was and you really thought it was something huge. You can also imagine being laughed out of the room.

One thing’s for sure, it never would have reached the stage it did without BuzzFeed’s Cates Holderness, who runs the company’s Tumblr, among other things. Speaking to Digiday, she explained how one of BuzzFeed’s followers had sent the official account of the picture, asking: “Can you settle this argument for us?” She said:

I got so confused, because it’s clearly a blue dress. So I’m looking at the comments, and people on Tumblr were freaking out and basically just yelling at each other. I called a couple people over and asked them, and half thought it was blue and half thought it was white. We started freaking out. There was a crowd of people looking at this photo and yelling at each other. One of the things we go by at BuzzFeed is, if it makes you feel something, you should post it.

The post, just a question asking “What colours are this dress?”, took five minutes. The rest is internet history. From there, it became news, because no one could stop talking about it. As tiresome as it may seem to some, a phenomenon such as the dress is pretty hard to write off for “you call this news?!” reasons.

And spare a thought for BuzzFeed UK’s Robin Edds, who discovered, too late, his mum was at the same wedding as #TheDress and could have nailed the scoop of the year.

2. There’s a lot more to optical illusions than we ever thought possible

Why did some people see black and blue and others white and gold? Why did it change for some people? Why were the two camps split almost neatly in two? WAS THIS SOME KIND OF SICK JOKE?

Ahem. The short answer is: the brain is weird and it does strange things. While everyone else was freaking out and arguing with one another about the real colour of the dress, scientists came forward to try and explain this oddity. Marie Rogers wrote:

Some people’s colour constancy is calibrated so that their brains tell them they are seeing gold and white, whereas some are led to believe they see black and blue. Of course, the colour constancy mechanism is always learning, and due to top-down information (eg reading others’ opinions) this calibration could change and lead to another experience. This may be the driving force behind people experiencing a shift from seeing white and gold to blue and black.

Researchers in America even went ahead and did a whole study on it:

Bevil Conway, a researcher at Wellesley College and MIT, asked 1,400 people, 300 of whom had never seen the picture before, to describe the dress. Overall, 57% said it had blue and black stripes, 30% saw white and gold stripes, and another 10% saw blue and brown. About 10% could switch between either colour combination.

3. People who create viral things by accident don’t usually get paid

In January 2016, Joe Veix wrote a piece on how “the weird, unfiltered internet became a media goldmine”, which in part looked at the economics of #TheDress.

Veix pointed out that while BuzzFeed was celebrating its traffic success with champagne, nobody else in the chain of production was getting paid.

Roman Originals, the dress’s designers, also did well out of the furore. They only expected to sell about 200 of the dresses a week. But after millions of tweets, they ended up selling 3,000 a week. It sold out twice, and they even produced a one-off white and gold version, selling it at auction for £1,200 in aid of Children in Need.

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Meanwhile, Cecilia Bleasdale, the woman who took the photo that started the meme and therefore owns the copyright, has attempted to chase up royalty payments. In December last year, she told the Guardian the money collected so far hadn’t paid their solicitor’s fees.

The issue around copyright of the image has been a little muddled – many places, including BuzzFeed, embedded the Tumblr post which included the image. But that post has since been deleted, leaving a gaping whole in internet history.

4. Traditional media didn’t know how to cover it

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#TheDress highlighted how difficult it can be for traditional media outlets to cover viral phenomena. It had clearly caused a lot of conversation online, but how on earth do you tell the story in print when the optical illusion disappears the minute the picture is printed?

Several papers made a stab at it, some even splashing altered pictures of the dress on the front page.

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However, with print deadlines not being favourable to the timing of a story that had broken in the US, much of the coverage boiled down to: “A couple of days ago loads of people were talking about this dress on the internet because it was a fascinating optical illusion. To help you understand this, we’ve printed a picture that won’t change colour, because it is ink.”

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It was unclear what they were trying to tell their readers. If the reader had seen the dress online, they had no need to be re-informed of it. And if they hadn’t seen the dress online, then the description of it really yielded no insight.

5. People have continually looked for the next #TheDress

Viral content comes and goes in a social media flash. A recent piece looking at the 15-year-old meme “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” described a world where it took months and months for one image to gain meme status on the web.

But now, viral content can be found anywhere, and popularity is more of an explosion than a slow burn. As Veix noted of #TheDress:

One of the biggest viral phenomena of the last decade started as a Facebook post with less than 20 likes.

Have a gander on Twitter, and you’ll see people trying to have a stab at it with other memes and optical illusions:

Nobody could have predicted that #TheDress would get so huge. It leads to people scrabbling around and publishing all sorts of things that might become the next big thing. Will it be German students printing out memes and posting them on a door? Or trying to decide if red cabbage or red onions have been thrown down a toilet? Or could it be Daniel, back at it again with his white Vans? Who knows. But we’re willing to bet you won’t see it coming.

6. Everyone will have something to say

As with anything the media gets a little bit obsessed over, there was no end to the think pieces. You had essays on the science, on the viral internet, on the fashion ... and then there were the ones which went for a completely different angle, like Bevil Conway, who said she wasn’t in team white or gold or team blue and black.

When I first saw the dress I thought it was orange and blue, and a Photoshop analysis of the colours of the pixels of the dress shows this to be the case. I am a visual artist, trained in painting. Painters generally try to be mindful of what the visual system does to colours; I always try to abstract colours from their surrounding context, where possible. This might explain why I see it differently than the two majority camps. One way or another, painters interested in capturing the colour of the natural world must learn how to do something rather unnatural: they have to learn to see the colour of light.

7. Tattoos of memes are a thing now

Daniel Howland of Texas went one step further than arguing with strangers on the internet. He gave the meme a permanent home on his leg.

Last year, he told BuzzFeed: “I pretty much got it because, I mean, I keep up with all the social memes and hysteria and whatever, and this is the only one that I really couldn’t wrap my brain around. So I just decided to do it.”

And he’s still at it this year – just the other day, he got a tattoo commemorating 2016’s hottest meme so far, Damn Daniel.

8. It could happen all over again when you least expect it

So beware.