![]() It’s literally evaporating from this planet.”īy far the most difficult dress to recreate, however, was the white pleated one immortalized in “The Seven Year Itch,” another Travilla creation. “It’s quite hard to find existing things,” she said. Headaches aside, she said, when the money is there, it’s “always easier to make it” than to find something vintage. While she didn’t resort to the pool table technique, she did empathize with Travilla’s woes when she ran into similar problems herself. She learned in Travilla’s book that when the pink “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” dress wasn’t moving correctly as Monroe descended down the stairs singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” he, in a last-minute panic, procured some green felt meant for a pool table from another department and lined the garment with it. “We couldn’t obviously access the same fabrics, but it was really important to uphold the quality of construction to those original dresses so they didn’t feel like a cheap simulation or like a costume,” Johnson said. Instead, Johnson relied on the films themselves, photos in director Andrew Dominik’s 750-page “bible” for the shoot, and a little booklet by William Travilla, the longtime studio costume designer who was responsible for many of Monroe’s most famous film looks. In fact, the only Monroe item she was able to study in real life, a jacket from the film “Niagara” that is kept at Western Costume in Los Angeles, did not make the cut. The vast majority of the frocks star Ana de Armas wears in the film as Monroe are recreations that Johnson and her team had to make without the actual reference garment on hand. While “Blonde” may be a fictionalized version of Monroe’s story, the costumes are ripped from reality. ![]() Suffice it to say, “Blonde” costume designer Jennifer Johnson felt an enormous amount of pressure to get the dresses that we all know so well right for the Netflix film, streaming now. The white subway dress she wore for the scene fetched $4.6 million at auction in 2011 and several years later the “touring” replica went for $120,000. They have been recreated, reimagined and referenced many, many times, from big budget movies and music videos down to cheap costume stores and everything in between. Think of the hot pink strapless gown she wore to sing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Or the white halter cocktail dress that billowed up over a subway grate in “The Seven Year Itch.” Marilyn Monroe’s on-screen costumes are almost as iconic as her.
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