It’s been nearly 50 years since e’s green dress shocked viewers on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” But what was created as a punch line, in the 1975 episode “You Try to Be a Nice Guy” — where Moore encourages a former sex worker to branch out into fashion design — has enduring appeal. Today marks what would have been Moore’s 88th birthday — she passed away in 2017 from cardiopulmonary arrest after contracting pneumonia — and ahead of her birthday, Google searches for Moore’s green dress spiked.
There are ample search results for the green dress on social media, where users on TikTok and Twitter continue to share and discuss the dress decades after its debut. Even half a century after it premiered, the dress still feels current. That’s because the dress was ahead of its time.
The amount of skin it showed was bold in 1975, when the boundaries of women’s fashion — in real-life, the workplace, and on TV — were shifting. “She designed it especially for me,” Moore says in the episode of the dress, to which Ted Baxter demands his wife Georgette gets him a glass of water. “It’s very nice,” Georgette says in passing to Moore, adding, “It sure shows off your skin.
” The clothes were a main character on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and the green dress was a star. Moore’s show was not only feminist in narrative, it was also feminist in fashion — using her wardrobe as a vehicle to model how women didn’t have to adhere to older societal n.
