Serrano had already been working with Johns since 2019, borrowing pieces from the Icon Collection for the Academy Museum (including the red sequined gown Monroe wore opposite Jane Russell at the start of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—it appeared in the museum’s inaugural costume-design exhibition). But the pink dress altered the scale of her thinking entirely. “I saw the pink dress at his house, and it was then that I started conceptualizing an exhibition around it,” she says.
Photo: Ye Fan; Courtesy of the Academy Museum
Serrano describes the dress as being placed in an “intimate, magical space,” surrounded by other chapters of Monroe’s carefully constructed mythology: the red Gentlemen Prefer Blondes gown, costumes from Some Like It Hot, annotated scripts, studio contracts, and objects from her Brentwood home.
The pink dress itself will be lit with a touch of cinematic trickery: From the front, the color will be heightened to evoke the hypersaturated glow of Technicolor; from the back, visitors will see something closer to how the dress appears in ordinary light. In other words, the museum is allowing the gown to perform two versions of itself at once: the fantasy and the fact.
Indeed, rather than trace Monroe’s life chronologically, “Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon” examines the many ways she shaped—and carefully controlled—her public image within (and sometimes in spite of) the studio system. “Everyone has seen images of Marilyn,” Serrano says, “but knows less about how carefully constructed they were.” Monroe reviewed contact sheets obsessively, selected images herself, crossed out negatives she disliked, and even cut up photographs she did not want reproduced. The exhibition mirrors that precision: Mannequins are 3D-printed renderings of Monroe’s body, the hair re-created style by style.
In “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” Monroe’s gold-digging Lorelei Lee descends a crimson staircase into a room full of men who seem to exist only to orbit her. Then, she does not so much dance as glide, gleam, and purr. Though Lorelei is often dismissed as a dumb blonde on the make, Monroe plays her as something far sharper: a woman who understands power, performance, and the economics of desire better than anyone in the room.
