It's scarcely believable but it's now been five years since the #TheDress.
Back in 2015, a dress striped with lace divided the Internet as people couldn’t agree if it was black-and-blue or white-and-gold.
The story began on February 26, when Cecilia Bleasdale, from Colonsay, Scotland, asked her family about the dress she wanted to wear at her daughter, Grace’s wedding.
But things quickly bypassed the world of fashion to enter the rarefied realm of optics, as members of the family literally didn’t see the same dress.
What began as a simple family argument grew into a friendly war on social media, as the post went viral when Buzzfeed journalist Cates Holderness noticed it.
Choose your side
Two digital armies soon gathered their forces under different hashtags - #whiteandgold or #blackandblue.
At the height of the debate, the post was receiving about 840,000 views per minute, according to Tumblr.
Looking back on the story, Holderness said: "The most interesting thing to me, is that it travelled.
"It went from New York media circle-jerk Twitter to international. And you could see it in my Twitter notifications because people started having conversations in, like, Spanish and Portuguese and then Japanese and Chinese and Thai and Arabic.
"It was amazing to watch this move from a local thing to a massive international phenomenon."
This benefited Roman Originalds, which saw its Lace Bodycon dress sold out within hours.
What colour is it?
A clear answer was sought to the puzzle of why humans apparently didn’t see the same colours.
Thankfully, neuroscientist Bevil Conway gave WIRED a scientific explanation: "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."
As the smoke of battle cleared, Cecilia's dress was confirmed to be black-and-blue.
