Dress

A dress, and by extension an outfit or dressing up. Most phones and apps draw a sleeveless dress hanging as if on display, in whatever colour the designer chose (as of 2026, no two platforms agree). The shape says "dress" in general: a sundress for a day out and a gown for a gala both fit, and the words around it tell you which one is on the hanger.

In practice it works as the clothing emoji for anything fashion-related. It headlines outfit-of-the-day posts, tags shopping hauls, asks or answers "what are you wearing?" before an event, and stands for the dress itself in wedding, prom, graduation and birthday planning. Fashion brands and shops use it the way a bakery uses 🧁: as a little sign for what they sell.

It is older than Unicode's version of it. The character came from the picture sets on Japanese mobile phones, where the usual name for this garment is ワンピース, "one-piece", because it is a single piece of clothing rather than a top and a skirt. When those carrier sets were brought into Unicode in 2010, the dress came with them under the plain English name Dress.

What does it mean when someone sends you 👗?

Almost always a real dress or a real plan to dress up. A friend sending 👗 before Saturday is talking about clothes: she has found one, needs one, or wants to know how formal the evening is. Paired with 🛍️ it is shopping; with 💍 or 👰 it is wedding talk; with 🎓 it is prom or graduation; after "ready!" it means dressed and out the door.

On its own it carries no code and no judgement. It is not a comment on your body or your taste, and it does not secretly mean a date or anything romantic; if a message about dinner ends with 👗, the sender is saying it is a dress-up kind of dinner. The one honest limit is colour: the dress in the picture is whatever that phone draws, so "wear this 👗" never means "wear green".