Marilyn Monroe Style

MARILYN STYLE MONROE

TERRY NEWMAN

CONTENTS

Previous page: Marilyn reads a book on acting techniques

‘FIFTY YEARS FROM NOW… THEY MAY LAUGH AT US FOR OUR PASSION FOR YOUTH, FOR SOMETHING CALLED GLAMOUR; FOR SLIM FEMALES WITH SHOULDER-LENGTH MANES, EXPLOITED BY THE MOVIES, RADIO, PIN-UPS, AND PRESS, WHO BECAME THE FEMININE PROTOTYPE OF AN ERA. FOR BEING A TIME IN HISTORY WHEN THE MANNER OF WEARING A SARONG, OR A SWEATER, OR A LOCK OF HAIR, COULD MAKE A WOMAN WORLDFAMOUS OVERNIGHT.’

– Vogue, 1943

FORMATIVE YEARS

BECOMING ‘THE GIRL’

FILMS

NIAGARA

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH

SOME LIKE IT HOT THE MISFITS

CLOTHES

DENIM

SWIMWEAR

ROBES

SWEATERS

TROUSERS

SIMPLE, CASUAL & CHIC

DAY DRESSES

COATS, WRAPS & FURS

SUITS

ACCESSORIES

EVENING WEAR

MARILYN AND THE DESIGNERS SHE WORE

MARILYN AND DIOR

MARILYN AND PUCCI

MARILYN AND FERRAGAMO

MARILYN AND CHANEL

MARILYN AND THE DESIGNERS SHE INFLUENCED

MARILYN AND GUCCI

MARILYN AND YVES SAINT LAURENT

MARILYN AND VERSACE

MARILYN AND DOLCE & GABBANA

MARILYN AND THE CELEBRITIES SHE INFLUENCED

MARILYN AND KIM KARDASHIAN

MARILYN AND BILLIE EILISH

MARILYN AND BEYONCÉ

MARILYN AND LANA DEL REY

AFTERWORD

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

PHOTO CREDITS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & BIOGRAPHY

BECOMING ̕ THE GIRL ̕

In 1945, aged 19, Marilyn Monroe went to see the Emmeline Snively Blue Book Modeling Agency. In a 1962 interview, Snively describes how Marilyn arrived wearing ‘a little white dress, not something you’d wear on a photographic shoot, and it was as clean and white and as ironed and shining as she was’ (Marilyn Monroe History, 2023). The wholesome girl-next-door look that Marilyn manifested was something magazines and photographers sought to capture, and the resulting images of a conservative, idealised wife reflect this. But the clothes she wore for castings and campaigns are of a similar ilk, revealing how, post-war, gender equality was no longer encouraged. Factories were once again full of returning soldiers doing jobs that no longer existed for women. Instead, women were expected to return to the home and reconcile the strains of war and the Depression by way of their domestic prowess. Despite her clothes suggesting a certain conformity, Norma Jeane’s home life was very different. She left her first husband in 1946, primarily because she wanted to work and had outgrown her marriage.

At the modelling agency, she was quickly in demand. Her first advertising job was for the Douglas Airview magazine, promoting their DC-6 aeroplane; the cover shows Norma Jeane enjoying its comforts while wearing an unassuming dark twopiece skirt-suit. The April 1946 issue of The Family Circle, shot by Hungarian photographer André de Dienes, features Monroe on the front page, barefoot, dressed in a puff-sleeved pinafore with a bow in her hair and holding a new-born lamb. That same year, Argo-Flex cameras featured her in their advertisement wearing gingham trousers and a tight jumper, with her curls

pulled back in a bow. A 1945 shot of her by Dienes wearing a handmade fisherman’s jumper would appear on the cover of the 13 December 1947 issue of the UK’s Picture Post: it was a magazine that regularly attracted over one million readers. Dienes had taken the 19-year-old Norma Jeane on a five-week road trip when she first began modelling and, although he had originally wanted to shoot nudes, the shots he took portray Marilyn in technicolour health, posing in the hearty outdoors dressed in primary colours and cute sporty outfits.

Despite this initial success, the young Norma Jeane was deemed unpolished. German photographer László Willinger, who came to America in the late 1930s and would go on to portray some of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, including Ava Gardner and Hedy Lamarr, remembers how ‘she had one bad tooth at the front which I had fixed at my expense. Her hair was kinky which someone else fixed’ (Marilyn Monroe: Beyond the Legend, 1987). The agency thought her hair was too curly and dark, so they lightened and straightened it, establishing a look that she would maintain throughout her career. By the end of 1946, she had her first contract at Twentieth Century Fox and began using her stage name 'Marilyn Monroe' (officially changing it in 1956). In 1949, Dienes and Monroe would drive to Malibu beach and create a set of pictures together for a book of poetry and philosophy. The resulting photographs show Marilyn wearing no makeup and wrapped in nothing but a black blanket; one of these pictures would go on to become the Picture Post’s March 1949 cover. These rare images show a young unadorned girl, eager for fame; a sneak preview of what she hoped to become.

Marilyn modelling shorts and crop top, California, 1953

THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH

‘SHE

WAS A FULL-SIZED WOMAN, BUT SHE HAD A TINY WAIST. SHE COULD WEAR THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS

WITHOUT EVER LOOKING VULGAR.’

LOOKING CLOTHES

– William Travilla, quoted in Classic Hollywood Style, 2012

Marilyn’s wardrobe in The Seven Year Itch (1955) is a masterclass in ‘Travilla wear’: a satin, ‘tiger’ zigzag column gown and a wiggle dress with a criss-cross neckline, both fitting her like a glove. However, it is the stunning bone-white, rayon acetate, fit-and-flair halterneck dress that the designer created for Marilyn’s character, ‘The Girl’, which shows his mastery of pleat work. It was the seventh film he had dressed her for: ‘I wondered, what could I do with this most beautiful girl that Marilyn was to play to make her look clean, talcum-powdered, and adorable?’ (quoted in Hansford, 2017). Travilla knew and loved Marilyn and worked hard to create something that she would approve of, but also something that respected her. He once quipped, ‘When I die, I don’t want to be buried or cremated, just pleat me’ (quoted in Jorgensen & Scoggins, 2015). His signature design feature was used to incomparable effect for Monroe’s The Seven Year Itch dress, its sunray crimping working to its very best advantage for the famous moment in the fim when she stands above the subway grating. Travilla was an engineer of fabric, and the intricate folds and tucks he used to form Marilyn’s most famous dress go unnoticed, with the point of focus becoming Marilyn’s underwear as the dress flies up. By then, she was married to baseball star Joe DiMaggio and, although she wore two pairs of knickers that day to appease her then husband, he loathed the dress and the attention it brought to his wife. Shots of the scene reveal a throng of over 100 photographers surrounding Monroe during filming in September 1954, with over 1,000 onlookers in the background. It was after midnight before shooting finally finished. Film director Billy Wilder repeated the spectacle 14 times but had to reshoot again back at the Fox lot because of the noise from the crowd.

SWEATERS

‘YOU FELLOWS DOWN THERE ARE ALWAYS WHISTLING AT SWEATER GIRLS. WELL, TAKE AWAY THEIR SWEATERS AND WHAT HAVE YOU GOT?’

– Marilyn Monroe, Saturday Evening Post, May 1956

MARILYN WAS ONLY 11

years old when Lana Turner wore a tight sweater and a beret during her 1937 film They Won’t Forget. Turner was onscreen for less than 15 minutes, but her outfit caused a stir because of its figurehugging fit. She heralded the arrival of the sassy ‘Sweater Girl’ trend, though fashion-forward knitwear had been a wardrobe staple for some years prior. In the 1920s, Chanel pioneered a fresh aesthetic for women, designing boyish cardigans made of jersey, which became a signature of the Parisian house. At around the same time, Jean Patou made sporty woollen separates; his creations were functional but chic, so could be worn for more than just playing tennis.

Hand-knitting at home was a useful and efficient way of reworking secondhand or outgrown pullovers, and during the American Depression and again when the Second World War raged, it became essential. Body shape follows the fashion sweater. In the ’20s, a slim, androgynous figure echoed the fluid

knitwear featured on magazines’ style pages. In the ’30s and ’40s, a more curvaceous silhouette was desirable. In August 1944, Vogue declared:

‘It’s a smart girl who does not […] even this year, play traitor to the sweater. Only now, the sweater fits, it defines, often emphasises the girl inside. It’s pulled snug over the hips, exclamation-pointed at the waist […] in it she looks and feels like the all-American pin-up girl, only better.’

Lingerie manufacturers’ brassieres at the time, including Maidenform’s bullet bra and Perma-Lift’s ‘lift that never lets you down’ designs, took the sweater girl to almost cartoonish levels, and starlets including Marilyn and Jane Russell would use the look to their best advantage. Monroe’s earliest modelling tests with André de Dienes in 1945, when she was 19, feature her wearing versions of the sharp sweater-girl silhouette. She reportedly had the habit of sewing

buttons into her sweaters to create the favoured erect-nipple shape. Later, this ultra-pointy profile evolved into a softer ‘cone’ contour, but the bust was still a key erogenous zone and the fashion sweater a versatile, core closet essential for stylish women. Marilyn’s 1948 film, Ladies of the Chorus, features her as Peggy, who wears an elegant, black knitted top with plunging neckline, designed to show off her figure.

Her supporting role as the secretary, Iris Martin, in Home Town Story (1951) sees Marilyn wear a stylish two-tone jumper adorned with a brooch at the neck. She had worn the same a year before in The Fireball (1950) – a sweater that likely came from her own wardrobe, as it was well known for contract actresses to supplement their onscreen looks with their own clothes. A June 1953 Vogue editorial championed the options available and features the myriad styles of sweaters from pillbox, halter, blazer, city, and even beach and bathing: ‘the better half of a summer wardrobe could be built on the summer sweater.’

SUITS

‘I’M THE SAME PERSON, IT’S JUST A DIFFERENT SUIT.’

– Marilyn

1956 (Marilyn Monroe History, 2014)

A SUIT is not typically remembered as a Marilyn Monroe outfit, but it was a choice she returned to time and again, with each telling a different story of moments in her life and films. Traditionally infused with propriety and tradition, a well-cut suit is both formal and feminine and embodied women’s fashion throughout the 1940s and ’50s. During the Second World War, tailoring was a practical option, with utility fabrics featuring simple, unadorned lines with few embellishments and pockets. Padded shoulders, however, were de rigueur and a boxy silhouette, with a hint of the military about it, pervaded. Mainbocher, the American creative who opened a fashion house in Paris before relocating back to New York at the start of the war, was known for his elegant ballgowns and tweed dinner suits. He also famously reworked the uniform worn by women in the American Navy and Red Cross.

At this time, the work of British designer Edward Molyneux and his svelte suiting was in great demand, selling at the smart department store Bergdorf Goodman’s ‘Custom Salon’, where affluent customers would visit for

bespoke orders. Similarly, Bonwit Teller’s ‘Salon de Couture’ provided an upscale environment where Parisian designers sold top of the range two-pieces. Often the designs would trickle down to the mass market where comparable versions would sell at cheaper prices, off the rack. An early 1941 shot of Marilyn shows her wearing an inexpensive smart skirt suit, most probably her only one, and is plain to the point of austere, echoing the prevailing fashion for an unfussy and minimal shape. The outfit reflects the wardrobe of a thousand aspiring young professional women, who either sewed their own clothes or bought copies of high fashion-house designs.

One of Marilyn’s first appearances in a magazine was modelling a ‘Hollywood Star Suit’ from the company Arnold’s of Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard, which cost $16.98 plus postage (Nickens & Zeno, 2012). Post-war women’s tailoring reflected the reestablished feminised role of women and became less no-frills and more chic, accessorised with gloves, hats and mini handbags. Marilyn’s character Bobbie Stevens in her 1951 film Love Nest, is an ex-member of the Women’s Army

Corps and reflects this changing fashion in her wardrobe of chic two-piece suits designed by Renié Conley, all with matching gloves and tiny hats.

When Monroe was filming Niagara in 1952, director Henry Hathaway requested she wear some of her own clothes. It wasn’t an unusual request at that time, and Marilyn had worn her own clothes in films before. This time, however, she ‘replied without embarrassment that she possessed only slacks, sweaters and one black suit, which she bought for [American talent agent] Johnny Hyde’s funeral’. She purportedly said, ‘that’s why I have to borrow clothes from the studio when I go out. I don’t have any of my own’ (quoted in Spoto, 1994). Hyde, with whom Marilyn was having an affair, had suffered a heart attack in December 1950 and the suit Marilyn had bought for the occasion was still treasured two years later. As required, the outfit makes an appearance in the film, an off-the-peg, double-breasted, elegant suit from I. Magnin & Co., the exclusive Beverly Hills department store. Marilyn’s character in Niagara is a seductive femme fatale, most known for her

Marilyn looks stunning in a suit with trim detail as she arrives at La Guardia Airport in New York, 1952

MARILYN AND DIOR

In 1952, Marilyn Monroe confessed to Movieland Magazine that her favourite suit was designed by Christian Dior, the distinguished couturier. There were items in Monroe’s wardrobe that she was careless of and there were those that she loved and took great care of. A blanket-like, belted, camel Dior coat she wore time and time again, most famously when photographed by Milton Greene, is one trusty example. A sales receipt, from Polly’s at 480 Park Avenue where Marilyn bought it, details ‘this Christian Dior coat ought to be very good for you both here and in California’ (Julien’s Auctions, 2016c). It cost $350, along with a black wool dinner dress charged at $290. Fashion in the ’50s saw women the world over dressing in copies of Dior’s structured, corseted, hourglass-shaped clothes, first shown on graceful models in the atelier’s elegant Parisian drawing rooms and replicated by seamstresses all over. It was this ultra-feminine silhouette that defined the character of the era.

Marilyn was courted by Dior; in March 1958, in anticipation of a visit to Paris, the couture house sent a letter in an attempt to entice her to pay them a visit, and they wired a telegram informing her they would send design sketches. The following year, they contacted her to suggest creating gowns for the Cannes Film Festival if she were to attend. In 1962, Monroe wore Dior for Vogue’s September issue, photographed by

‘I HAVE TWO FAVOURITE SUITS. ONE IS BLACK CHRISTIAN DIOR; BUT INSTEAD OF WEARING A BLOUSE OR GILET, I WEAR FRESH RED ROSES AT THE PLUNGED NECKLINE. I LIKE TO WEAR FLOWERS; I EVEN HAVE SOME ARTIFICIAL ONES FOR TIMES WHEN FRESH ONES AREN’T HANDY.’

–

Marilyn Monroe, Movieland Magazine, July 1952

Bert Stern for part of a series that famously would become ‘The Last Sitting’. Although at this point in her career Monroe was refusing all requests, Stern ‘wanted to put an image on the page that would be delicious and utterly memorable’. He felt that ‘the definitive picture of her had yet to be taken’ and was determined to do so, revealing, ‘Marilyn Monroe was that magic image for me, as she was for millions of other American men’ (Stern, 1982).

Styled by American Vogue’s fashion editor Babs Simpson, the black, backless Dior dress was chosen to help distinguish the iconic image Stern eventually took. The final shot shows Marilyn looking as refined and resplendent as an English princess. Moreover, with her signature white-blonde locks swept back by the famous hairdresser Kenneth Battelle, known to his friends and clients simply as Mr Kenneth, Monroe appears insouciant and blasé of the high-profile magazine editorial set-up that day at the Hotel Bel-Air in California. What comes across on camera is Marilyn’s innate ability to intuitively inhabit the clothes she wore, to make them her own. A decade earlier, she accessorised her preferred Dior suit with red roses, sometimes real, sometimes fake, because she loved flowers. She didn’t need a Vogue editor to dress her because she knew what made her look good.

MARILYN AND THE CELEBRITIES SHE INFLUENCED

‘I FELT RELATED TO MARILYN SPIRITUALLY.’

– Debbie Harry, Vice, 2012

Fashion is about transformation and Marilyn’s career evidenced the wide possibilities of the power of an electrifying appearance. She took everything to the stage when it came to dressing up for an audience and spent hours in front of the mirror refining her looks. It was a formula that still inspires celebrities today to interpret Monroe’s style and is testimony to her enduring status as a film goddess. In 1956, when Marilyn filmed The Prince and the Showgirl in London, the newspapers typically went crazy about her, with the Daily Mirror describing Marilyn as ‘the sleek, the pink and the beautiful’ while The Spectator pointed out that she was ‘as intelligent as she was pleasant as she was pretty’ (quoted in Spoto, 1993). Monroe was not simply courting an audience with her clothes, but the paparazzi and the media, too. She was shrewd enough to know she needed them onside to succeed in her career and because she always delivered, without fail, they kept coming back for more.

This symbiotic relationship is commonplace now in times of myriad digital platforms. In a series of 1961 interviews, Marilyn spoke of how she ‘has to look a certain way – be beautiful – and act a certain way, be talented,’ yet at the same time admitting, ‘it’s a relief to get in sloppy clothes and not worry about the impression you’re making – any of it. But it’s part of my career – my life! – and I accept it’ (quoted in Weatherby, 1989). Red carpet appearances are a well-established routine today, yet in an overcrowded showground, still one of the most sure-fire ways of magnetising attention is to revisit one of Marilyn’s iconic outfits. There are many to choose from and the thrill of seeing the juxtaposition of reinterpretation rarely fails to hit the headlines.

According to fashion historian Darnell-Jamal Lisby, Monroe ‘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

MARILYN MONROE’S WORLD WAS THE STUFF OF FAIRY TALES – THE GIRL WHO CONQUERED HOLLYWOOD AND WAS HAILED AS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD BEFORE HER UNTIMELY DEATH IN 1962.

MARILYN MONROE STYLE CELEBRATES MARILYN’S IMPACT ON FASHION BY REVEALING THE INFLUENCE OF HER MANY ICONIC LOOKS. HER WARDROBE ENCOMPASSED SENSUAL FEMININITY AS WELL AS LOW-KEY MINIMALISM. OUTFITS SPAN FROM SHIMMERING SHOWPIECES SUCH AS THE JEAN LOUIS GOWN WORN TO SERENADE JFK ON HIS BIRTHDAY, TO PUCCI SLACKS AND CAT’S-EYE SPECTACLES.

BORN NORMA JEANE MORTENSEN, WHENEVER SHE ‘BECAME’ MARILYN, SHE MESMERISED ONLOOKERS WITH SHOWSTOPPING OUTFITS THAT HELPED MAKE HER A LEGEND, YET THROUGHOUT HER LIFE, THE CLOTHES SHE WORE REPRESENTED MANY WAYS OF BEING A WOMAN.

WRITTEN BY TERRY NEWMAN – THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF TAYLOR SWIFT AND THE CLOTHES SHE WEARS – THIS BOOK TELLS THE STORY OF MARILYN’S LIFE THROUGH CLOTHES AND IS ESSENTIAL READING FOR MARILYN MONROE FANS EVERYWHERE.

ISBN: 978-1-78884-276-1