Women behind dress that broke the internet speak out almost a decade later
Remember that dress? The one that pretty much single-handedly sent the entire internet into a frenzy back in 2015?
Well, in case if you've been living under a rock for the past eight years - the dress became a worldwide internet sensation overnight when people fought over what colour it was: black and blue or white and gold.
And now, the women behind the dress that changed internet culture forever have spoken out for the first time ever since the whole phenomenon.
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But, before we get into all of that, let's rewind back to the earlier days of social media - when Instagram filters were still plastered all over the place and everyone still wore skinny jeans.
What first started as a simple bickering session between family on a remote Scottish island, went on to be catapulted into a global news story that, essentially, sent the entirety of the internet into a collective s***storm.
And that's an understatement.
The whole fiasco can be boiled down to a wedding for a couple from Colonsay, in Scotland's Inner Hebrides.
Before the ceremony, the mother of Grace, the bride, Cecilia Bleasdale, snapped a picture of a dress she was thinking of wearing for the special occasion.
Speaking in an interview for the first time since the dress took over the internet earlier this week (4 June), Grace explained: "In the weeks leading up to my wedding, my mum sent me a picture of a dress that she was intending to wear.
"And I said, 'Why is my mum wearing a white dress to my wedding?'"
Grace then showed the snap to her husband-to-be and he said: "Well, it's not. It's blue and black."
The very first case study...
She continued: "We showed it to his parents and they saw blue and black. So I kind of thought I might be going insane."
No wonder.
But how did it go viral?
Well, one of the couple's pals, Caitlin McNeill, uploaded the message to Tumblr - remember that - where it was picked up by Cates Holderness, a journalist for Buzzfeed.
Since then - there was absolutely no going back.
The next morning, Caitlin recalled: "We woke up to about 1000 messages from our friends saying you need to look at Twitter because the first three trending topics were the dress, blue and black [and] white and gold."
At the very peak of its hysteria, the post was receiving a staggering 840,000 views per minute according to Tumblr's director of data, Tom Christ.
And, considering, we're talking about the days when social media and viral sensations were still in their teething stages - that's some pretty impressive numbers.
Caitlin continued: "And then, like kind of half an hour later, I had a phone call from somebody trying to patch me through to The Ellen Show."
After some more international buzz, Caitlin ended up getting a notification that she had been added to the 'Time Magazine's 30 most influential people on the internet'.
Now, let's just clear it up once and for all incase there was still some confusion - the dress is 'definitely blue and black'.
So, what does make us see it so differently?
"It's really complicated," Grace began.
Caitlin continued: "Well, it's something to do with the cones in your eyes. It's how the light hits the dress."
In a WIRED article from the time in 2015, Bevil Conway - an artist and Harvard-educated neuroscientist specialising in colour perception - explained: "What's happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis.
"So 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."
So, after all that, you'd expect the pair to have made some big bucks from the whole situation, but this couldn't have been farther from the case.
Grace revealed: "I think everybody sort of assumes that we were coining it in and we had all these amazing experiences and that we were famous, but it wasn't like that at all."
They had made the decision to 'just do the one thing which was The Ellen Show' and after that they 'just kind of carried on with [their] lives'.
She added: "I mean, I think there's a lot of things we would have done differently if it happened now.
"We didn't have any guidance or media training or anything and it was quite frightening at times."
She continued: "We could have absolutely milked it and gone on every single thing going and, with hindsight, I wish we did a wee bit more."
When talking about who actually owns the rights to the photograph, Grace explained all the rights remain with her mum.
She disclosed that her mum has not been able to monetise the situation at all, and when asked if she made any money from it, Grace stated 'not really' just 'nominal amounts'.
"Those opportunities were taken away from her essentially, we're not wealthy people. It would have been nice to benefit from it slightly more," she added.
And now the question we're all wondering - where on earth is the dress now?
Grace's mum's ex-partner is currently in possession of it.
Caitlin explained: "I think we're all past the point of thinking that making more money out of it is worth any more strife."
The pair have since coined a theory over 'the curse of the dress' after Grace's divorce, her mum's own relationship breakdown, as well as 'a few little fall outs' along the way.
Well, it's clear all of our lives have been forever altered by the viral garment that once rocked the world right off its wheels.
Topics: Fashion, Viral, UK News, World News, Social Media
Rhiannon Ingle