It was as though we’d never been more divided. Families, friends, colleagues; all ripped apart by the way we saw the world.
Blue and black. White and gold.
Ten years ago today, BuzzFeed’s post about The Dress took over the internet — and our lives — for a few days. The post broke BuzzFeed’s traffic records, and nearly, its servers. In a single day, it got 28 million views, 94% from social media, and nearly 700,000 concurrent users — before, as all such moments do, slipping from our reality as our attention moved on. But it was, briefly, a media (and cultural) triumph.
It could never happen today. The reason why says something dire for media, and for all of us in These Our Times.
No matter where you were in 2015, The Dress probably evokes for you, as it does for me, a strong pang of internet nostalgia. I can still summon my stubbornly strong opinion on the matter (black and blue all the way) more readily than I can recall any subsequent reporting that explained the divide and transformed the debate into a way to better understand the world and ourselves.
It feels like a very long time ago in media. It was, forgive me, a “simpler time”: pre-COVID-19, pre-Donald Trump and “fake news”; when social media was still a largely collective and occasionally more joyful place.
For those who were in audience roles back then, The Dress also evokes a small shudder of PTSD from when we were told to make something “go viral”; when “pivot to video” was a prevailing strategy, not a cynical industry punchline; when newsrooms fought about whether a massive moment of internet culture met the rigor of what merited coverage.
These fights haven’t disappeared, but newsrooms seem to mostly get that it’s a good idea to find a smart way to talk about what your audience cares about. Or, stated more artfully by my colleague Kristen Hare: “Did The Dress walk so Taylor engagement could run?”
If The Dress were to happen today, it would probably provoke a different conversation. BuzzFeed didn’t discover The Dress; a staff member took it from a Facebook post — written by a member of a wedding party in Scotland — in a way that now would probably be seen as untoward, if not outright theft. As my colleague Ellen Hine put it: “People today (often rightly) get upset when a creator’s content is used without proper credit/collaboration/permission, especially when it’s clearly being used to generate headlines.”
But there are other reasons why The Dress could not happen now. It’s not just that it wasn’t replicable (as much as newsrooms have tried). It heralded the end of a specific era of media.
Back then, it was possible to have conversations dominate across platforms because there were fewer of them, and they worked differently. We could all look at, more or less, the same information, the same set of facts. Now, in an increasingly fragmented and algorithm-driven social media world, it seems implausible that our individual “For You” pages across our increasingly splintered platforms could all contain the same moment — however silly and harmless.
That’s kind of by design. As BuzzFeed’s former editor Ben Smith wrote in his book: “To (Facebook), the Dress hadn’t been a goofy triumph: it had been a kind of a bug, something that scared them. The Dress itself was harmless, but the next meme to colonize the entire platform within minutes might not be, and this one had moved too fast for the team in Menlo Park to control.”
Or, as Smith called it: “the last, greatest, totally harmless moment of global internet culture”
The Dress was obviously never going to solve any real problems. It didn’t offer any profound insights into how newsrooms can better attract, engage, convert or retain audiences, beyond the simple concept that what we write doesn’t have to be capital-I-Important all the time; we can delight and entertain and surprise as well as inform, because our audiences contain multitudes.
If we want to learn anything from The Dress, perhaps it should be how compelled we are to be right; how persuaded we are by what we think is true, even as half the planet is yelling at us because they see the same issue differently.
It’s a deeper cautionary tale for journalists that has only gotten more real. As Craig Silverman wrote for Poynter at the time, an analysis that holds up shockingly well in an age of misinformation and artificial intelligence:
We are all at the mercy of our brains and its cognitive processes. Our eyes took in the information in front of us, our brains processed it, and in many cases it gave us the wrong answer. But the fact that it was coming from our brain meant that it seemed like exactly the right answer. People insisted on what they were seeing because it was what they were actually seeing.
We don’t go about our daily lives assuming that our own brains — and our eyes — can give us faulty information.
They do, all the time.
The simple truth is our brains process information in ways that can lead us astray. This is something every journalist needs to be aware of and account for in the work we do.
If you were stunned to read that The Dress just turned 10, perhaps the more sobering fact is how sinister that sensibility — of how media can trick our brains and how stubbornly we are convinced by things we agree with — has become in media today, with much more at stake.
Or, to torture the metaphor a bit: 10 years ago, we looked at a dress and were divided about what it meant. Now, we are increasingly shown different dresses and think they are the same thing.
In 2015, we were united by something that divided us. In 2025, that no longer seems possible.
