Blowing in the Wind: Marilyn Monroe and That Iconic White Dress

This month marks sixty-five years since one of the most iconic moments in twentieth-century popular culture: Marilyn Monroe’s angelic white dress being blown sky high by wind rushing up from a subway grate beneath her feet in the film The Seven Year Itch. Billy Wilder shot multiple takes, while Sam Shaw snapped photo after photo for what had to be the biggest publicity stunt ever staged at the time. Marilyn wore two pairs of underwear for the shot, yet, as noted in Lois Banner's critical biography Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox (2012), "a dark blotch of pubic hair" remained visible to the 100 male photographers and over 1,500 male spectators, all of whom crowded eagerly around the set to gawk and drool. Due to strict 1950s movie censorship laws, photos had to be doctored to white out the offending blotch, but those in attendance saw it, over and over, shot after shot. Marilyn's husband at the time, the extremely old fashioned Joe DiMaggio, stormed off the set in a huff.

There's something inherently sleazy about more than a thousand men leering with sinister intent at one exposed and vulnerable woman. Yet, this was Marilyn, and standing in the center of it all, her star power was more powerful than all of those creeping eyes combined. She understood the situation—she alone controlled the emotions of every man in attendance. Her mere presence was whipping them into a frenzy, as they cheered during the long shoot, “More, more Marilyn, let’s see more!” She later noted, “What was supposed to be a fun scene turned into a sex scene,” adding with a flirtatious wink and a nod to her explosive sexuality, “I hope all those extra takes are not for [Wilder’s] Hollywood friends to enjoy at a private party.”

Of this famous scene and photo shoot, Banner wrote:

Yet the scene in the shoot is naughty, with the phallic subway train, its blast of air, and Marilyn’s erotic stance. Yet she is in control. She is the ‘woman on top,’ drawing from the metaphor for women’s power that runs through Euro-American history. She poses for the male gaze, but she is an unruly woman—the Mere Folle of medieval Carnivale; the white witch with supernatural powers; the burlesque star in ‘an upside-down world of enormous, powerful women and powerless, victimized men.’ In the photo Marilyn is so gorgeous, so glamorous, so incandescent…that she seems every inch a star, glorying in her success.

A shooting star, captured at peak ascendancy, for all the world to see. Sixty-five years later, we're still marveling at Marilyn and that iconic moment.