Kim Kardashian inspired the International Council of Museums to launch a clothing preservation committee in 2022 when she wore Marilyn Monroe’s 60-year-old dress to the Met Gala. On loan from Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the skin-toned, the diamanté dress was iconic not just for its design, but also because Monroe once wore it, also known as one of the most photographed and talked about figures in pop culture. Though Kim could not fill Monroe’s shoes, the parallels between these two stars are clear. It was considered both a violation of American history and an act of genius. At $4.8 million, Marilyn Monroe’s dress remains the most expensive to have ever been sold at auction, a price that reflects the image (and scandal) of the superstar presenting herself as a sparkling siren for the Washington elite. “Nowadays everyone wears sheer dresses, but that wasn’t the case back then,” Kim told Chioma Nadi in the lead-up to that year’s Met Gala. “In a sense, it’s the original naked dress. That’s why it was so shocking.” Today, she just launched a physical replica as part of the Skims and Swarovski collaboration. It hasn’t been marketed as an imitation of the Monroe dress (and there is no reference to the piece in any of the surrounding press) but it’s clearly there: a nude-illusion, floor-length gown scattered with delicate rhinestones.
“When Kim wore the Marilyn Monroe dress to the Met Gala, she was making a statement about her willingness to co-opt ‘aura’ in the most Walter Benjamin [a 20th-century cultural critic] sense of the term,” says MJ Corey, a writer and psychotherapist who is working on a book titled DeKonstructing the Kardashians. “The dress which had been made for and worn by Marilyn Monroe cannot be reproduced in an absolute way, because it was made by someone iconic for an iconic moment in time. So by mass-manufacturing the very dress that she co-opted, Kim is now giving everyone else the chance to do to the dress exactly what she did to Marilyn’s dress. So it creates layers of consumer impulse.”
Some 17 months later, the 2022 Met Gala might also be seen through another lens: as the ultimate advertisement for Skims itself. Not only did Kim wear her own shapewear underneath the garment, but she also lost 16lbs to fit into it. If the goal of Skims is to sculpt people’s bodies, then Kim became her brand’s best living advertisement that same evening. And the fact that she felt at ease using Monroe as a vessel for this project was always going to invite talk. It seems obvious that there was always going to be a Skims duplicate of Monroe’s dress in the works, it’s just shocking that it’s taken this long to happen. Now you too can own the “most expensive dress in the world”, for only $196.
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