Marilyn Monroe is the original woman who could do both, so let's take a look back at her timeless style...
When I was eleven, I remember sitting on the bed, looking up, and seeing Marilyn Monroe’s face staring back at me. She was held onto my friend’s wardrobe door by the grace of a few lumps of blue-tac, her shoulder warped slightly by where a corner had been bent. Even so, her glossy lipstick looked freshly applied, and her wide smile was frozen in a moment I could imagine. I’d close my eyes and I could see it - people talking and cameras flashing, the bulbs swallowing the world with relentless bursts of white. The cameraman’s shirt untucking itself as he moved, as he strode about the set and shouted things like “smile, Marilyn”, “turn, Marilyn” and “look over your shoulder, Marilyn”.
Later that night, when the conversation lulled, my friend and I looked at the poster, transfixed. “She was so beautiful,” the eleven-year-old beside me eventually said.
She was beautiful - but it takes more than a pretty face and an hourglass figure to make people remember you. The true magnetism of Marilyn Monroe doesn’t lie in her gleaming teeth or in her platinum hair; even today, actresses like this are a dime a dozen. Marilyn is remembered nearly 60 years on because there was just something about the woman. A rawness as well as a polish, a vulnerability; a look in her eye that spoke of perfect joy one moment and then of sadness the next. She was endlessly relatable, enduringly human, effervescently glamorous - and nothing captured this better than her wardrobe.
Because, yes, it may be easy to discount the gowns as gaudy or, as Joan Crawford said in the 50s, ‘vulgar’, but what if there was more to them than that? Cast your mind back to the iconic dress the actress wore in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - a silk affair in the hottest pink possible, clinging to her curves and complemented by ludicrously long gloves and lashings of diamonds.
With that choice of colour, material and accessories, no outfit could be more audaciously ‘feminine’. Coincidentally, Marilyn was deeply interested in what it meant to be a woman, and - more importantly - by what it meant to be a successful woman. In Vogue, Elizabeth Winder notes how clued up on this the actress tried to be, reading biographies of “Joséphine Bonaparte, Lady Emma Hamilton, Marie Antoinette, and Eleanora Duse - bold women who seized control of their image; women whose personalities defined the age they lived in and glittered out from the past.”
In a Hollywood dominated by dinner jackets and bow ties, Marilyn plunged into society’s most dramatic idea of femininity - sexy, glamorous, and dripping in jewels. In another scene from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she appears in a pleated gold dress with a neckline so low (by 1950s standards) that it was nearly cut by censors. The iconic white dress, meanwhile - flapping about over a subway grate - is just as shamelessly seductive.
Marilyn was exploited for her sex appeal, but she also used it to her own advantage. These dresses were the means to empowerment; a celebration of the female fantasy.
Marilyn was endlessly glam both on and off-screen, even while she looked so different in her downtime. Winder writes of how the photographer Milton Greene disproved of her style, which “ricocheted from skintight to slovenly with little in between.” But the fisherman jumpers, the high-waisted shorts, the jeans, culottes and turtlenecks - all this casual-wear told us that Marilyn was someone we could understand, someone we could relate to. She was a girl-next-door one minute and then a showgirl the next; she was a woman who could do both.
More than this, Marilyn’s wardrobe reflected her spontaneity. “Whenever she needed something to go out, she’d go to her friend in the wardrobe department at Twentieth,” Milton’s wife Amy remembers. “She’d borrow something, and then the next morning she’d bring it back with a $50 bill slipped in.” As Winder points out, "it would have been cheaper to buy her own dresses - but Marilyn didn’t plan that far ahead.”
Consider her tragic childhood and fraught personal relationships, and this flightiness isn’t surprising. But what Marilyn made of these hardships - an imaginative, aspirational, and yet homely and accessible take on glamour - is what makes her style iconic.
So this year, when the actress would have turned 92 - take inspiration from Ms Monroe when adding to your own wardrobe. Celebrate your figure, flap a fan and flash your jewels and let everyone around you have it. Burn the candle at both ends by wrapping up in knitwear one moment and getting dolled up to the nines the next.
Better yet, combine both looks into one. Would Marilyn approve of a metallic evening gown with a pair of city-scuffed trainers? Why yes, I think she would.
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Listen: The Death of Marilyn Monroe on BBC World Service
Two photographers - Eve Arnold and George Barris - remember the Hollywood legend, in all her tragicomic glory.
Watch: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
For that fabulous pink dress, of course. Oh, and not to mention the orange fishtailed number she wears in the ball scene - you know, the one from the gif.
