How does this artwork elucidate its Aftermath?
Twigley donated the dress to national children's charity TLC for Kids. The dress was auctioned off in October 2004, going for A$23,000. TLC later rejected the winning bid when it discovered the buyer had links to adult dating agency RedHotPie. The charity then offered the underbidders the dress, but later changed their mind because they could not guarantee media coverage for the purchaser. The dress was returned to Twigley, who donated it to Chris Judd's then football club, the West Coast Eagles.Following Tarvydas's death in 2014, Rebecca Judd acknowledged the dress in her tribute to the designer on Twitter, saying "You changed my life with your red dress Ruth. RIP beautiful lady x". The dress was the final gown in the Tarvydas tribute show at the Perth Fashion Festival.Even in the 2020s, the media still refers to the dress as "that dress".
In an article entitled "Brownlow: The show stopping and jaw dropping fashion moments" and published in 2020, Jackie Epstein of the Herald Sun described the wearing of the "... barely there red dress that got the nation talking and kickstarted a career ..." as "... [p]erhaps the Brownlow’s most iconic moment." Epstein also claimed that by wearing the dress, "Rebecca Twigley who became Rebecca Judd etched her name into the world forever."A different opinion was expressed by radio personality Bridget Hustwaite in an article in The Age in 2023. Hustwaite, who had recently begun a relationship with professional footballer Oscar McDonald, was lamenting the tendency of her acquaintances and colleagues, upon being told about the new "someone", to ask "Oh, so you're a WAG now?" After noting that the expression WAG, as an acronym for "wives and girlfriends" of footballers, had originated in England in the early to mid-2000s, she commented, "Locally, it was the reporting of Bec Judd’s 2004 Brownlow Medal dress that promoted WAG into the Australian vocabulary and was consequently embraced by trolls who used it to objectify women."
The Age Herald Sun WAG Chris Judd West Coast Eagles Bridget Hustwaite Oscar McDonald 2004 Brownlow Medal A$ Twitter Twigley Rebecca Judd