At the 2025 CFDA Awards last night, Amber Valletta reminded everyone that she wore that iconic Versace jungle dress first.
Valletta hit the red carpet in an archival design from the Italian house that, despite being most closely associated with Jennifer Lopez, was actually worn by her on the runway first just before the turn of the century. The model’s CFDA self-reference hails from Versace’s spring 2000 collection—she also wore it for one of the brand’s advertising campaigns in late 1999. Epitomizing Versace’s signature sex appeal, it features a daringly low neckline that plunges to the navel with a dramatic leg split up the center.
While it’s en vogue to self reference yourself on the red carpet these days, Valletta also wore the dress to honor Donatella Versace, who was honored by the CFDA with the Positive Change Award.
“I’ve never worn my dress out in public,” Valletta said on Monday night. “This is the first time that I’ve ever worn it on the red carpet and so I’m just really excited to be in the magical dress.”
Valletta did wear the jungle dress first—followed by Donatella herself at the 1999 Met Gala and Geri Halliwell shortly after—but it was Lopez who cemented it in fashion and pop culture history. The singer slipped into the daring design at the 2000 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Images of Lopez in it caused such a media frenzy, that it was the impetus behind the creation of Google Images.
“People wanted more than just text,” former Google executive Eric Schmidt wrote in 2015. “This first became apparent after the 2000 Grammy Awards, where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world’s attention. At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: JLo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born.”
In the years since, the dress—of which there are multiple iterations—has lived many lives. After the Grammys, J.Lo wore it twice on SNL, once in 2001 and again in 2019. That same year, she walked the Versace runway in a reinterpretation of the look to mark its 20th anniversary. Another version lives at the Grammy Museum in L.A. It even once walked down the runway of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
According to Lopez, the moment almost didn’t come to fruition. “It was a dress that other people had worn already,” Lopez said in 2019. “My stylist was like, ‘Please don’t wear it. Somebody else has worn it.’”
“I was like, ‘Well, you bought it, and it looks the best, so I’m going to wear it.’ And so I did. And it caused quite a stir.”
Source: W Magazine