How Marilyn Monroe owned her beauty and sexuality with pioneering boldness
Marilyn Monroe’s inspiring efforts to create and shape her public image are being celebrated at LA’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
There she stands, in that iconic hot pink gown, arms thrown open wide as if to both offer herself to the world and embrace what the world offers – love, applause, admiration and diamonds, which are, as she sang from the body-hugging confines of that pink silk in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a girl’s best friend.
It is not her, of course, though it is the dress, designed by William Travilla and now a part of the new “Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon” installation at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Running until February 2027, it is one of many exhibitions and events across the US timed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Monroe’s birth.
More than 60 years after her death, Monroe still glows brightly in the Hollywood firmament. Her film career only lasted 17 years, but during that time she dazzled so brightly that her image remains burned into our collective consciousness, an unfading after-image of a bursting star.
Her death – at 36 by way of overdose – did much to cement her legacy, generating international headlines and then a multitude of conspiracy theories, many of them involving powerful men, including members of the equally mythic Kennedy family.
Tragedy and mystery are powerful binding agents, but they do not quite explain the tower of books that have been, and continue to be, written about her (including several published this year), the many films made about her life, and the art she inspired – from Andy Warhol’s iconic silkscreen Marilyn Diptych (done a year after her death) to Seward Johnson’s massive statue Forever Marilyn, which, after some controversy, found its permanent home in Palm Springs five years ago.