Later this year, a new biopic, Blonde, will be released on Netflix, starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel of the same name, Blonde is a fictional account of the two lives of a woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson who will forever be celebrated as Marilyn. Seen reductively, Norma Jeane was the California sweetheart, smiling happily on the beach, her hair falling in soft curls around her face, wearing a sweater and slacks. Marilyn, by contrast, was the sex-pot, the vamp, the one who wore nothing to bed but Chanel No 5 and serenaded JFK while sewn into a flesh-coloured Jean Louis dress glistening in rhinestones.
Yet while Monroe’s dresses have become some of the most revered fashion items in history, in truth, the actor was no clotheshorse. Her image may have been carefully crafted and precisely exercised – both by herself, and the studios that directed her – but clothes were merely a vehicle for Marilyn. While she wore pieces by the American designers James Galanos and Ceil Chapman and had a number of favourite looks by Lanvin, Monroe never cultivated a powerful relationship with a fashion designer in the way that Audrey Hepburn did with Hubert de Givenchy, which is perhaps indicative of her attitude to style in general. It was something to be used as a tool rather than passionately feted.
On screen, Monroe’s presence was largely crafted by costume designer William Travilla, who frequently worked with Twentieth Century Fox on its blockbuster productions. It was Travilla who created the dresses that the legend of Marilyn is most closely associated with: the pink strapless dress in which she performed “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”; the red slashed-to-the-thigh spanglers worn by both Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953); the daringly low-cut gold pleated lamé dress from How To Marry A Millionaire (1953); and, of course, the white halter neck from The Seven Year Itch (1955).
Inevitably, there was some crossover between the life of Marilyn on celluloid and Marilyn out and about in Hollywood. She knew how to turn on the glitz when required. She wore the gold pleated dress from How To Marry A Millionaire (against Travilla’s advice) to collect an award at the Beverly Hills Hotel, resulting in numerous front-page splashes the next day. On another occasion, she wore the red dress from the movie Niagara (1953) to a party held in her honour.
None of these gowns tells us much about Marilyn the woman, however. This was just her movie-star persona. Away from the spotlight, Monroe’s wardrobe was rivetingly minimal, with the actress returning to a few key pieces again and again. In her private life, she dressed in the manner of the serious actor she was so desperate to become, rather than the performative “dumb blonde” persona within which casting directors had caged her. While she had her tricks, famously sewing marbles into her jumpers to make her breasts more prominent, she was refreshingly modern in her sartorial choices – and understood keenly the balance of great style, particularly from the mid-’50s onwards.
During her New York phase, when she studied with Actors Studio director Lee Strasberg and married playwright Arthur Miller, she favoured more sober ensembles: shirts and capri pants, black beatnik sweaters and dresses, enveloping beige and cream fur coats. In her book, Marilyn In Manhattan: Her Year Of Joy, Elizabeth Winder details a makeover overseen by Amy Greene, the wife of photographer Milton Greene, with whom the star stayed in Connecticut in 1954. According to Greene, “Whenever she [Marilyn] needed something to go out, she’d go to her friend in the wardrobe department at Twentieth. She’d borrow something, and then the next morning she’d bring it back with a $50 bill slipped in.”
In place of those borrowed dresses, Greene bought Marilyn pieces from Anne Klein and commissioned George Nardiello and Norman Norell to create a select wardrobe for her. “The result was a capsule collection of black sheaths and slips, sexy but simple and perfectly in tune with Marilyn’s aesthetics,” Winder explains. “Each dress was skintight, just the way she liked it, but in Norell’s ‘slipper satin’ sober black mattes they looked refreshingly natural – more curvy selkie than wanton bombshell. She liked them so much she had copies made, supplementing the couture originals with cheaper versions sewn by Seventh Avenue dressmakers.”
Aside from this, Monroe’s penchant for denim encapsulated a whole-hearted American mood. Her turn in “Lady” Levi’s in The Misfits (1961) helped popularise blue denims for women, while several pairs of her jeans were sold at Christie’s record-breaking 1999 sale of her personal effects, with Tommy Hilfiger snapping up the pair she wore in River Of No Return (1954) for an extraordinary $37,000, as well as a pair of square-toe cowboy boots from The Misfits for $75,000.
In terms of her shoes, Monroe adored Salvatore Ferragamo, from whom she would order multiple pairs of the same three-inch-heel court shoe, with a more comfortable half-wood-half-metal stiletto that Ferragamo had patented for her. Her devotion to the brand – also a favourite of Audrey Hepburn – proved so enduring that it staged a retrospective exhibition at its Florentine gallery in 2013 to mark the 50th anniversary of her death. Included in the displays were a number of her pumps, including a red Swarovski-encrusted pair (sold for $48,300 at Christie’s).
Again, the contrast between the star’s on- and off-screen wardrobes stood out. “She paid little attention to the relentless changes in fashion, and loved simplicity to the point that her clothing was meant just to be worn and not shown off, clothing that didn’t include extras – not even jewellery, which she would give away to her friends,” Stefania Ricci writes in the exhibition’s catalogue. Take the string of Mikimoto pearls gifted to Monroe by Emperor Hirohito during her honeymoon in Japan with her second husband Joe DiMaggio, which she gifted to Strasberg’s daughter after she admired it. She was never beholden to material items, happily scattering them among her loved ones.
The only contradiction to her predilection for classically hued pieces was a fondness for Emilio Pucci’s brightly coloured jersey designs, which suited Californian forays in the sun. A lime-green Pucci blouse would be the last outfit she was photographed in before her death in August 1963, and she was buried in a peppermint-coloured Pucci dress, chosen by her housekeeper for the funeral because Monroe loved it so much.
Yet, almost 60 years on from her passing, Monroe’s name remains synonymous with classic Hollywood glamour. Bouncy blonde curls, lashings of lipstick and glitzy gowns feature prominently across the reams of merchandise which are – to this day – lucratively licensed in her name. At some point in the mid-’50s, Marilyn signed a nude calendar for Travilla with the words, “Billy, dear, please dress me forever. I love you, Marilyn.” And, in some ways, given the notoriety of the images of her in his creations, he really did.
