Incredible story behind Geri Halliwell's Union Jack dress: "It was a tea towel"
24 October 2025, 11:56
A tea towel, some spray paint, and a dash of rebellion – the making of an iconic Spice Girls dress.
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The Union Jack dress worn by Geri Halliwell during the 1997 BRIT Awards is one of the most iconic fashion moments in pop history.
But the story behind the dress is far more spontaneous than most people realise.
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By early 1997, Spice Girls mania was sweeping the globe. Their debut album, Spice, had been released just a few months earlier in November 1996, and had rocketed to number one in more than a dozen countries, driven by the breakout success of singles like 'Wannabe' and 'Say You'll Be There.'
With their infectious energy and their rallying cry of "Girl Power," the group had become the face of a new generation of pop music — brash and proudly feminine.
“It felt like everything we had worked for led up to that moment,” Geri told Vogue in 2020 about the Spice Girls' first BRIT Awards performance.
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Wanting her stage outfit to mirror the importance of the occasion, Geri said she first considered a sleek designer option.
“I remember this little black Gucci dress got presented to me. It was almost like a 1950s, Marilyn-shape swimming costume. Tom Ford was working with Gucci at that time,” she remembered.
Still, she wasn’t convinced it made enough of a statement. That’s when inspiration struck: “I remember thinking, It’s the Brits: British flag!”
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Geri set about making her vision a reality: “I’ve always been a secret fashion designer,” she joked.
“I don’t know if this is true, but you’re not meant to cut up a flag,” she said. “So I found a tea towel. My sister did it, because she’s better at sewing than I am.”
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To counter concerns raised by her stylist about possible political misinterpretation, Horner added a symbolic twist. “I remember showing [the dress] to a stylist and she said to me, ‘You can’t wear that—it’s National Front,’ an extreme party that existed in Britain that was very racist,” Horner recalls.
“I said, ‘No, stop—we celebrate all cultures.’ And that’s why I put the peace sign on the back.”
Geri went one step further and even customised her boots for the performance.
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“My father’s a mechanic, and I had car spray from the garage and sprayed it red to match,” she says. “The length of the dress is the sexuality, and the big bobber boots are saying, ‘You’re not going to mess with me.’”
The Spice Girls performing at the 1997 BRIT Awards:
Spice Girls - Wannabe & Who Do You Think You Are [BRIT Awards 1997 Remastered]
The impact was immediate. “I woke up the next morning, and that picture of me in the dress was on the front page of every newspaper,” she remembers.
“That dress really became the identity of what girl power stood for. People would wear their own version of it. Suddenly you started seeing the British flag on a lot of fashion.”
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Even after Geri Horner left the Spice Girls in 1998, the Union Jack dress continued to take on a life of its own.
Not long after her departure, the piece went under the hammer at Sotheby’s, fetching an astonishing £41,000 and earning a place in the Guinness World Records as the highest price ever paid for a piece of pop star’s clothing.
The winning bid came from the Hard Rock Cafe, which later placed the dress on display in its Las Vegas hotel, where it remained a centrepiece of the collection until 2015.
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Nearly a decade later, when the Spice Girls reunited for their 2007 world tour, Geri's Union Jack dress was once again reborn.
The tour's wardrobe was designed by Roberto Cavalli who put his own spin on the famous dress. “We really needed to turn the volume up on it, and Cavalli did that with crystals,” Geri recalled.
She also remembers the audiences mirroring her look in a show of solidarity. “Every country that we went to, we’d see girls, and guys, in the Union Jack dress. It was almost like a uniform unifying us all.”
Nearly two decades after the original stole the show, Geri revisited the iconic Union Jack look — but with a twist.
In 2019, she reunited once again with the Spice Girls (minus Victoria Beckham) for a massive reunion tour across the UK and Ireland, playing to sold-out stadiums and a new generation of fans.
Now married to Christian Horner, the ex-team principal of the Red Bull Racing Formula One team, and living a very different life from her 90s pop stardom days, Geri chose to reinterpret her most famous fashion moment.
Geri now famously wears only white clothing head-to-toe, and rather than donning the original mini-dress, she wore a custom-made, floor-length Union Jack gown.
“I felt a sense of power to developing the dress into something different, even more timeless,” she told the press at the time.
“To me, it shows the evolution of being a woman. As you grow older, you suddenly feel confident to cover up.”
However, in an exclusive interview with Heart, Geri did admit that she does have some Spice Girls costumes in her collection.
"I'll tell you what I have got and I saw the other day. From Lift Me Up, the song, I've still got that," she confessed.
"I found that little dress that I've got from that video. It's like a little blue sort of paisley shirt dress... One or two pieces I've got."
