The Dress

Examples

Team Fortress 2 Spies wear white-and-gold and blue-and-black versions of the disputed dress.

Two Spies, two dress colors

Source ↗
Credit & details

No visible caption. Team Fortress 2 Spies wear white-and-gold and blue-and-black versions of the disputed dress.

Source media ↗
Tweet screenshot showing a dress split vertically into white-and-gold and blue-and-black halves. Caption: this changes up the game fr...

This changes up the game

Source ↗
Credit & details

this changes up the game fr...

Screenshot credits jay / @MUNCHiiCHi

Source media ↗
Screenshot of Taylor Swift’s tweet about the dress color debate. Caption: I don’t understand this odd dress debate and I feel like it’s a trick somehow. I’m confused and scared. PS it’s OBVIOUSLY BLUE AND BLACK

Taylor Swift on the dress

Source ↗
Credit & details

I don’t understand this odd dress debate and I feel like it’s a trick somehow. I’m confused and scared. PS it’s OBVIOUSLY BLUE AND BLACK

Screenshot attributes tweet to Taylor Swift / @taylorswift13; screenshot provenance is KYM, not authenticated account API.

Source media ↗
Is he Blue & Black or Gold & White

This is like an illusion fr

Source ↗
Credit & details

Is he Blue & Black or Gold & White

retained Know Your Meme source page and original visible marks.

Source media ↗
2015 mfs fighting over the colour of a dress / Black and blue / White and gold

Those were simpler times

Source ↗

Abbreviated profanity in native caption.

Credit & details

2015 mfs fighting over the colour of a dress / Black and blue / White and gold

retained Know Your Meme source page and original visible marks.

Source media ↗
The blue and black Power Rangers are captioned The White Ranger and Gold Ranger.

The Rangers have been renamed without consultation

Source ↗
Credit & details

The photograph argument escapes into a world where colour is practically a character’s name. Calling the blue and black Rangers white and gold makes the disagreement absurdly concrete: even the uniforms can no longer settle it.

Embedded marks retained

Source media ↗
A Captain America: Civil War-style poster labels Captain America Black and Blue and Tony Stark White and Gold.

A very expensive way to settle a colour argument

Source ↗
Credit & details

Two opposing answers are assigned to two opposing heroes. The edit scales a small disagreement up to a superhero confrontation. The printed May 6, 2016 belongs to the poster design; this image was already archived in February 2015, so it is not the meme’s creation date or a record of film dialogue.

Embedded marks retained

Source media ↗
About & sources

One dress photograph turns an everyday color question into a shared argument: are you seeing white and gold, or blue and black?

Date

A photograph circulated on Tumblr in February 2015, asking whether the dress looked white and gold or blue and black.

History

The selected year marks the February 2015 online debate, not the manufacture of the garment. Know Your Meme documents the Tumblr question and its spread through a BuzzFeed poll, Reddit discussions and visual jokes. The physical garment was sold as blue and black; the viral question concerns how its photograph appears to different viewers. The preview is a three-panel comparison with visibly different color treatments of the dress photograph, not the unaltered original image or the original Tumblr thread. Do not use this edited comparison to test which colors you would have seen in the original. Display settings and the surrounding page are not standardized here; this is not a scientific experiment.

Know Your Meme — The Dress (origin and spread)
Catalog image
The Dress representative image