Marilyn Monroe, already a film and cultural icon, emerges as fashion star on anniversary of her death

Marilyn Monroe, already a film and cultural icon, emerges as fashion star on anniversary of her death


Sunday marks 50 years since the death of Marilyn Monroe, who a half century later remains the ultimate icon of popular culture.

Monroe, legendary for her calculated design of wholesome goodness and sex goddess - going from brunette pin-up girl Norma Jeane Baker (born "Mortenson) to the silver screen's blonde of all blondes - has had her life, loves and death endlessly studied, chronicled, investigated, dissected and put back together in books, movies and television.

Now fashion visionary can be added to reasons for our enduring fascination with her.

"No one since Marilyn has quite mixed sex and fashion like she did," says Christopher Nickens, co-author with George Zeno of the newly published "Marilyn in Fashion" (Running Press, 2012).

She did, after all, wear the most famous dress ever on film: a white halter with an accordion pleated circle skirt by William Travilla. The dress billowed above a New York subway grate in "The Seven Year Itch" revealing her panties, much to the disappointment and anger of her husband, baseball great Joe DiMaggio. Many said it was the beginning of the couple's marriage breakdown. Last year, Debbie Reynolds, who owned the dress, auctioned it for $5.6 million at a Profiles in History auction in Beverly Hills.

Later came Monroe's notoriously sheer gown, adorned with 4,000 rhinestones, that she wore as she breathlessly sang "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy on his 45th at Madison Square Garden. She promised to dress with decorum. Instead, she wore no bra or panties under the Jean Louis gown she bought for $5,000. In 1999, it sold for more than $1.26 million at Christie's Auction House in New York.

Never snobbish about clothes, Monroe mixed off-the-rack outfits and costumes from her movies with selected high-end labels, Nickens said.

She even bought a couple of Gene Tierney's castoffs that were designed by Tierney's husband, Oleg Cassini, who later became Jacqueline Kennedy's official first lady couturier.

Monroe wore Ferragamo shoes, J.C. Penney denim, sweaters and carried Louis Vuitton handbags. She lounged in capri pants and Emilio Pucci tops. She often went sans undergarments and wore a stripper's G-string under sheer designs.

"In her own way, she was a feminist," Nickens says.

She sought up-and-coming designers, but on the screen she was dressed by the best costumers: Travilla, Louis, Dorothy Jeakins, Eloise Jenssen and others who created memorable movie looks for her, including Travilla's hot pink strapless number for "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." Madonna later copied it for her "Material Girl" music video in 1985.

But Monroe's most loved garment was her terry-cloth bathrobe, Nickens says. She wore it so often that she had a standing order for the $18.67 garment from Bullock's Wilshire, a defunct Los Angeles department store.

She played to her curves with form-fitting silhouettes "instead of the styles of the time that included layered petticoats over voluminous skirts topped by Peter Pan collars," he says.

And she kept fit for her skin-tight wardrobe by working out with weights, decades before the fitness craze. " 'It helps me keep what I've got where it belongs,' " Nickens said, quoting the star.

For more than 25 years, Nickens has written about Hollywood legends, including biographies of Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, Natalie Wood and Elizabeth Taylor, who never had much of an opinion about fashion, he says.

"She wasn't all that interested," he says about Taylor. "They'd put a dress on her but she always over did it. She'd throw on a hat and two more necklaces."

Monroe loved hats. And necklaces, naturally in diamonds - a girl's best friend. Later in life, she wore wigs. She wore one at her own funeral.

At 36, Monroe was found dead in 1962 in her bedroom in west Los Angeles. Her death was ruled "acute barbiturate poisoning" and listed as "probable suicide" even though murder theories, too, are rumored.