The Penis on Page 602 of the 1975 Fall/Winter Sears Catalog

What do viral phenomena even mean?

The anxiety began with The Dress, which was blue, and rolled through the news like a tidal wave, or an avalanche, depending on who you asked. The Dress, with its indeterminate color, and bodycon lace silhouette, was so densely the topic of conversation on the night of February 26, 2015 that I felt certain the rest of my life would be forever rearranged into the epoch of all that came before the garment, and a new, more important interpretation of the abbreviation A.D.

For several weeks and millions of page views we ran The Dress conversation into the ground, unable to pin down even a semblance of satisfying narrative meaning. To see the dress as white or blue meant nothing, except maybe something about the rods and cones in an individual’s eyes. Today, a little over six months later, the dress itself is on clearance, and global Dress-related discourse has slowed to a rate of fewer than twenty tweets per day. For a fleeting moment, it seemed to hold some arbitrary importance, but already it appears that history has sorted it into the toy box of kitsch nostalgia, alongside Dunkaroo cookies and leave Britney alone.