From her platinum hair to her iconic pleated white halter dress, there may be no other figure in pop culture history whose sense of style is so synonymous with her person as Marilyn Monroe. The blonde bombshell was known for her sultry but soft signature style, which toed the line between sex symbol and demure femininity with figure-hugging silhouettes, dramatic red carpet dresses, and minimalist off-duty uniforms. It\u2019s revisited to great effect in Andrew Dominik\u2019s Blonde, an experimental re-imagining of the actor\u2019s glittering but tragic life that releases on Netflix on Sept. 28. In the film, Ana de Armas plays Monroe and wears exquisite recreations of many of her most legendary looks.While Monroe\u2019s time in the public eye was relatively brief, spanning just under two decades, her impact on fashion is still influential and felt. When someone sports a beauty mark with red lips, Monroe instantly springs to mind.<\/p>\n
From Madonna\u2019s Monroe cosplay during her \u201cBlonde Ambition\u201d era to the proliferation of Monroe impersonators, her look is not only often imitated, but easily identified. Most recently, Kim Kardashian\u2019s decision to wear the famous bedazzled nude dress that the actor wore to sing \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d to President John F. Kennedy in 1962 to the 2022 Met Gala was another reminder of the collective ongoing obsession with Monroe.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s the most American thing you can think of? And that\u2019s Marilyn Monroe,\u201d Kardashian told Vogue in an interview about the dress. \u201cFor me, the most Marilyn Monroe moment is when she sang \u2018Happy Birthday,\u2019 to JFK, it was that look.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, to fully understand why Monroe still holds such a powerful sway on the fashion sphere, nearly 60 years after her death at the age of 36, fashion historian and author of Classic Hollywood Style Caroline Young points to a few crucial factors to consider. Young notes that Monroe put forth a carefully crafted on-screen persona that was sexy, glamorous, and glitzy. This is the side of Monroe that was most heavily documented and that\u2019s what we most associate with her style, even though it did not necessarily reflect Monroe\u2019s actual wardrobe. While in her downtime, Monroe preferred slacks and turtlenecks or simple sheath dresses, it\u2019s the images of her in striking outfits on red carpets or in classic on-screen moments\u2014like when her white dress billowed out as she stood over a subway grate for the filming of The Seven Year Itch\u2014that are much more widespread.<\/p>\n
Young says Monroe\u2019s untimely death has meant the pictures that remain of her have become memorialized. \u201cHer image has been entwined these on-screen moments where she\u2019s wearing amazing costumes that stand out,\u201d Young tells TIME. \u201cBecause of those moments, her image has been ingrained in culture. You sort of have to wonder, if she lived into old age, whether those images would still be so iconic.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Blonde, the costumes help to delineate the glamorous and glitzy moments of Marilyn\u2019s public persona from the vulnerable and intimate moments of Norma Jeane, or who Monroe was in her downtime. Costume designer Jennifer Johnson painstakingly recreated many of Monroe\u2019s most iconic fashion moments on-screen for the film, including her famous pleated white halter dress from the subway grate scene in The Seven Year Itch and the legendary hot pink strapless column gown and matching opera gloves she donned to sing \u201cDiamonds Are a Girl\u2019s Best Friend\u201d in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.<\/p>\n
The film\u2019s more interesting come when Marilyn is dressed casually, usually in a pair of high-waisted gingham slacks and a black turtleneck like when she\u2019s visiting her mother in a mental institution or in the simple black sheath dress she wears while attending the Actors Studio in New York. These looks, a far cry from the hyper-sexy costumes on Hollywood sets and red carpets, are the uniform for the Monroe\u2019s quiet interiority and a reminder that despite the fact that she one of the most visible women in her industry, what audiences saw wasn\u2019t the full picture.<\/p>\n
Monroe also owes a significant amount of her influence on fashion to her close relationships with costume designers, says fashion historian and assistant curator of fashion for the Cleveland Museum of Art, Darnell-Jamal Lisby. He points to people like William Travilla, who was responsible for some of Monroe\u2019s most famous looks on- and off-screen, including the white halter dress from The Seven Year Itch, the hot pink gown she wore in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the gold lam\u00e9 gown she had to be sewn into to wear to a movie premiere (this outfit landed Monroe on the front page of newspapers the next day).\u201cThe costume designer and an actress or starlet have a very intimate relationship,\u201d Lisby tells TIME. \u201cThe one [between Monroe and Travilla] is a great example to show how that relationship resulted in a fashion marriage that helped create how we see Marilyn Monroe today.\u201d<\/p>\n
The power of presentation wasn\u2019t lost on Monroe either, Lisby says. For example, Monroe effectively used how she presented herself to the world as not only a way to boost her career, but to manage the press, creating headlines on her terms. When she wore the figure-hugging, crystal-embellished nude dress from Jean-Louis and designed by a young Bob Mackie, she was aware it would draw lots of attention and result in salacious news coverage.<\/p>\n
With this ability\u2014to use clothes to create buzzed-about moments\u2014Monroe paved the way for influencers and public figures like Kardashian to use presentation to create headlines, according to Young. The glitzy costumes we have come to associate most with Monroe, along with her beauty and distinct look, has made her an easy person to copy, with many a blonde bombshell, running the gamut from Gwen Stefani to Billie Eilish, emulating her look over the years.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe led the way for creating moments to get splashed on the front pages,\u201d Young says. \u201cShe was probably one of the first to use dress as a tool for that kind of attention and to be quite clever about it. She was just a lot smarter than people thought and she knew exactly what she was doing in those moments.\u201dAccording to Lisby, Monroe\u2019s enduring influence lies not just in how Monroe styled her image during her lifetime, but in how her legacy continues to inspire fashion creatives today.\u201cShe definitely holds a very specific place as an American fashion figure and rightfully so,\u201d says Lisby. \u201cWhile there are so many other fashion figures that have existed, looking at Marilyn Monroe, what she was able to emanate and be a muse for many costume and fashion designers is incredible and in the years that she was able to do it.\u201dRead more at:short prom dress uk<\/a> | long prom dresses<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From her platinum hair to her iconic pleated white halter dress, there may be no other figure in pop culture history whose sense of style is so synonymous with her person as Marilyn Monroe. The blonde bombshell was known for her sultry but soft signature style, which toed the line between sex symbol and demure … L\u00e4s mer<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13418,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-okategoriserad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.improveme.se\/latestlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.improveme.se\/latestlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.improveme.se\/latestlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.improveme.se\/latestlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13418"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.improveme.se\/latestlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.improveme.se\/latestlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.improveme.se\/latestlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.improveme.se\/latestlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.improveme.se\/latestlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.improveme.se\/latestlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}