Remember when Liz Hurley wore ‘that’ dress?

Editor’s Note: Delving into the archives of pop culture history, “Remember When?” is a new series offering a nostalgic look at the celebrity outfits that defined their eras.

Liz Hurley, who turns 60 on Tuesday, remains an icon of British style. After more than three decades in the spotlight, she still turns heads on the red carpet, runs her own beachwear line and was, just last year, named the “world’s sexiest woman” by Maxim magazine.

But it all began in 1994, when she made fashion history at the premiere of a movie she wasn’t even in.

This isn’t to say that “Four Weddings and a Funeral” wasn’t a big deal. The film grabbed an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and became the highest-grossing British production of all time — a title it held for 15 years.

But the movie’s premiere will only be remembered for one thing: Hurley’s black Versace dress, riven with deep slits and seemingly held together by a string of novelty-sized gold safety pins.

The model-slash-actress, then aged 29, was hardly a household name when she arrived on the red carpet that evening. Anyone unfamiliar with her turn as a henchwoman in the poorly received Wesley Snipes thriller “Passenger 57,” might simply have known her as Hugh Grant’s girlfriend.

One could, therefore, have reasonably expected it to be Grant’s night. After all, his performance in “Four Weddings” earned him a Golden Globe and launched a long and fruitful career playing slightly flustered Brits.

However, if your plus-one is a quintessential English pin-up wearing a scandalously revealing — for the time, at least — dress, then you should expect to have your limelight stolen. (He didn’t seem to mind: Take your eyes off Hurley’s outfit for a moment, and you’ll notice a floppy-haired Grant smiling sheepishly beside her, seemingly unable to believe his luck.)

With its salacious décolleté and sky-high leg slit, the Lycra and silk dress was a paparazzo’s dream. Its safety pins and double shoulder straps seemed to be the only things preventing it from falling apart on the spot. Hurley also deserves credit for wearing it with elegance and confidence, her tousled hair giving her the air of a glamorous everywoman.

Grant has since revealed that, due to Hurley’s low profile at the time, several labels turned down her requests for an outfit. “Someone told us: Oh, you can borrow things from top designers,” he recounted in a 2019 BBC documentary. “Poor Elizabeth rang some top designers, and they all said, ‘No, who are you?’ or ‘No, we’re not lending you anything.’”

Eventually she found one that would: Versace. She later described the dress as a “favor” — it was, apparently, the last one left at the Italian label’s press office when she called. Yet this accidental statement outfitwould change the trajectory of Hurley’s career, thrusting her out of Grant’s shadow and into the international spotlight.

In a Tatler cover story published later that year, she expressed surprise at the look’s impact. “Since I was 14, my mother has always said, ‘You’re not going out in that. I wash my hands of you.’” she said, “Only in England could a saucy dress have such an astounding effect.”

She wasn’t the evening’s only winner. The media delirium boosted Versace’s reputation as a fashion house whose designs “celebrate the female form rather than eliminate it,” as Hurley put it.

The dress also sparked a revolution in red-carpet eveningwear, which was remarkably modest in the mid-1990s. By reclaiming skimpiness for the wearer, and reminding us just how far a single look can get you, Hurley arguably paved the way for Jennifer Lopez’s plunging green Grammys dress (also Versace) in 2000 and Halle Berry’s sheer gown at the 2002 Oscars.

If you need any more persuading of the gown’s impact, just type “that dress” into Google, where Hurley’s Versace number even ranks above the viral dress whose color the internet argued over for weeks.

Yep, it’s officially that dress.

A version of this story was first published in August 2019.