How the ‘De Repente 30’ dress returned to success after nearly 20 years

The New York Times

A funny thing happened on the set of The American Voice on November 8: Ariana Grande, the show’s newest trainer, showed up to work wearing a Versace dress that, just a week earlier, had been worn as a costume at many Halloween parties in the US. U.S.

The colorful minidress – with straps embellished with rhinestones, empire waist, cutouts and thick stripes in shades of turquoise, lime green and scarlet – was launched as part of the Italian designer’s spring line in 2003.

But the model is best known for his brief appearance in the romantic comedy “Suddenly 30” when Jennifer Garner’s Jenna Rink uses him to dance the choreography of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” at a work party.

Nearly two decades after it came out, the dress has found new life, thanks in part to online retail groups that sell strikingly similar designs for less than $20 (about $113).

Vogue magazine predicted in October that the dress’s vibrant look would “be everywhere” on Halloween. And if the TikTok is any proof, it certainly was.

The dress’s resurgence coincides with a seething nostalgia for turn-of-the-millennium-era clothing, from head (buckles and hats) to feet (wide-mouth jeans and platform sandals).

But the model’s popularity goes beyond capturing the turn-of-the-millennium aesthetic: celebrities and influencers have been looking for specific archival pieces associated with turn-of-2000 pop culture, said Marian Park, youth fashion strategist at WGSN, a fashion agency. forecasting trends.

“It’s less about costumes and more about opulence and decadence,” she said, pointing to a 2000 vintage Roberto Cavalli dress with a tiger print and high side cutout worn by singer Aaliyah at the MTV Video Music Awards that year.

More recently, the dress was worn by model Paloma Elsesser, influencer Bretman Rock and Kim Kardashian.

Just remember that TikTok queen Addison Rae wore a 2003 vintage Gucci dress (design by Tom Ford) at the Met Gala. Or Olivia Rodrigo’s visit to the White House, in which she wore a plaid skirt, citing the model worn by Alicia Silverstone in “Beverly Hills Patties.”

“I think we’re going to see more and more joviality in clothing selection — and the association with the idea that a certain piece is part of a costume, or something specific to a movie or a cultural moment, will lose importance,” said Park. “The look is the most important.”

Susie DeSanto, the costume designer for “De Repente 30”, said the renewed interest in the fashion used in the film had been “insanity”. “Around Halloween, I couldn’t even count the number of photos I got showing people of all kinds — little girls, teenagers, drag queens — wearing that dress,” said DeSanto.

“People who do fashion podcasts in Spain and Brazil contacted me and interviewed me about the clothes, and they sent me pictures, asking where I got each piece, and where they could find them now.”

The film’s script called for clothes that were plausibly attractive to both a 13-year-old and a 30-year-old woman — fun, innocent, and sweet, but almost “sexy-baby” — and “stylists and women trends from the early 2000s seemed perfectly set to help us tell the story,” said DeSanto.

Garner’s character alternated Miu Miu, Moschino and Marc Jacobs dresses. (The fact that the film’s director, Gary Winick, was a fashion enthusiast helped a lot, DeSanto said.)

The Versace dress had been released late last year at a fashion show in Milan, with Britney Spears seated in the front row of the audience. Cathy Horyn, fashion critic for The New York Times, likened the model to “being mugged by a gang of angry Barbies.”

“It was a dress that worked for the scene, for the character, and that’s why we chose it and why she wore it,” said DeSanto.

While the play is perhaps losing some of its association with the film, it owes its resurgence to one of the stars of “De Repente 30.” On Halloween last year, Christa B. Allen, who played the younger version of Garner’s character in the film, bought a recreation of the dress from the Etsy website and recorded a video for TikTok that shows her replaying the scene. The video received over four million “likes”.

“Cosplay is strong at TikTok,” Allen said. “I realized that people love Jenna Rink and that I could offer them a way to get back into character and spend more time with her.”

At about the same time, model Elisha Herbert posted photos on Instagram that showed her wearing a re-creation of the dress she had commissioned from Nasteski, an Australian swimwear and festival fashion label whose customers love the looks of 2000s celebrities like Paris Hilton.

When stylist Anthea Nasteski posted photos of the dress, she received dozens of comments and some orders — like the Etsy salesperson, she’s charging more than $400 (BRL 2,253) to make the dress — but she didn’t actually publicize the model.

At the time, she thought it would be “in bad taste to resell someone else’s design”, even if the someone in question was Donatella Versace.

Nasteski produced the dress quickly. Because Halloween was just a few days away, when Herbert placed his order, she wore spandex and dyed fabrics that were left over in her studio.

But months later, in mid-2021, when the dress suddenly started selling on sites like Cider and Amazon for less than $20 (R$130) —and it became a viral hit—, the new replicas wore the same pattern of dyed colors that Nasteski had employed. And the photos that offer the dress for sale on Amazon are the same ones used on Herbert’s Instagram.

For Nasteski, this is another example of small stylists who see their work shown, without credit, on the platforms of large e-commerce companies. But it also represents something more complicated: the dress on sale copied the changes she made to the design, but the original design was not hers.

When the cheap versions of the dress came out, “it was suddenly everywhere,” Allen said. “I think if someone wears it, and people around you know the movie and the character, it creates a joyful shared moment. But even if people don’t know the dress and the character, the model is still beautiful.”

Before his 30th birthday, on November 11, Allen contacted Versace to see if the company would lend the original to use at the party. But she said she was kindly informed that the dress was already reserved for someone else. (She later found out it was Ariana Grande.)

Today the dress no longer seems to depend on nostalgia or even any knowledge of the film, said Mandy Lee, a trend analyst with a large following on TikTok. She recorded seeing someone wearing the dress recently in public at the “vintage” clothing store Beacon’s Closet, complete with fishnet stockings.

“I don’t think it should be seen as part of a movie costume,” Lee said. ‘, but a pretty dress in its own right.”

But she’s not sure that, after this new wave of popularity, the dress will prove to be enduring. At prices of less than $20 ($113), “the dress was very affordable,” which helped it go viral.

But that success may have killed him by making him a microtrend that people will come to hate for seeing him too often, which will send the model into the garbage can or thrift stores. “The overexposure that goes online now can ruin things sometimes,” Lee said.