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Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is anything but a straight-up biopic. Releasing on Netflix this Friday, the film—an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel of the same name and starring Ana de Armas—is a refracted window into the life of Marilyn Monroe, covering the Hollywood bombshell’s life story while freely blending fact and fiction. For the film’s costume designer Jennifer Johnson, however, this approach only allowed more room to play. “The movie is a look inside her psyche, so there was leeway,” says Johnson, who wanted to use clothes to showcase the true Marilyn. “There are two Marilyns in our movie—there’s Marilyn, and there’s Norma Jeane.”
Tackling such an iconic figure was no small challenge for Johnson, despite previously working on costumes for films such as I, Tonya and Miranda July’s Kajillionaire. With only four weeks to prepare for the project, her intense research process began by reading Dominik’s script, then pinpointing the standout style moments in each scene. “[Andrew] had this incredible 800-page thing we called the Bible,” says Johnson. “We printed that out, and I pasted it in our offices like wallpaper.” She then watched all of Monroe’s films and delved deeper into archival images of her, attempting to gain a better understanding of the iconic dresses they would try to re-create. “Understanding the construction of the dresses was a huge undertaking,” says Johnson. “A lot of research was necessary to make the re-creations come to life in a way that didn’t feel like a costume—and that felt really natural to Ana.”
Since the film aims to draw a clear line between Marilyn—the vampy, studio-manufactured bombshell—and Norma—a smart, sensitive artist—Johnson had to first establish how the two identities would differ fashion-wise. For her scenes as Norma, Johnson wanted a pared-back approach for de Armas. “Norma Jeane was quite a minimalist,” says Johnson. “She wasn’t clothes obsessed. It was important to find as many candid photographs of her and then fill in the blanks to what she might have actually worn.” Through her research, Johnson found that Monroe had become good friends with the designer Anne Klein and developed “this very chic look that was a black turtleneck and a pair of capri pants,” she explains. “[That look] signified her being a serious artist; Norma Jeane was really smart with business and image, and she wanted to be taken seriously as an actor.”
It was the glitzier scenes as Marilyn—including dresses now known around the world and endlessly imitated—that became the real challenge for Johnson. “It’s a stressful task to take something that’s been designed by some of the best designers in Hollywood,” she says, citing William Travilla as a prime example. The 20th Century Fox designer was responsible for two of Monroe’s most iconic dresses: the strapless pink gown in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the pleated white dress in The Seven Year Itch, which famously blew above her waistline thanks to a draft through a subway grate. For Blonde, Johnson recreated both designs. “Once you start investigating the materials and how it was constructed, you see it was extremely complicated,” says Johnson. “It was about getting those details right to honor those original designs.” Making matters even more difficult, scenes in the film were shot in both color and black and white—so Johnson had to consider that too. “We didn’t know what would be in color or black and white,” she says. “That was challenging because in black and white certain colors read very flat and muddy.”
Fittings and tailoring became especially crucial during preproduction, as most of the wardrobe was built custom from the ground up. Monroe was known for her sexy hourglass figure, after all, so most of the looks began with underpinnings. “There were little tricks that we did with the construction to make Ana feel more curvy,” says Johnson, who avoided prosthetics. (None were used in the film at all.) Johnson also wanted de Armas to be comfortable on set, in keeping with direct feedback from the actor herself: “She wanted to be comfortable so that she could really think about her character and just become Marilyn,” she says. Instead, small tricks were used, such as lightly padding the underwear and bra. “We did a soft tip rather than the real pointy tip, as it became very comical and distracting,” says Johnson of the bust. “We also had a one-inch piece of elastic around her waist—that was her corset.”
Special details that you may not even notice in the film were also important to Johnson and the costume team. One of her favorite dresses in the film, for instance, is a re-creation of a Some Like It Hot dress designed by Orry-Kelly that Monroe wears to sing with a live band. “In my research, we found that Kelly designed a see-through heart lined with rhinestones on her left ass cheek,” says Johnson. “You don’t see it in the movie, but I really tried to give Ana little presents that helped her get into character.” Even the shoes were well thought-out. Johnson worked with a cobbler at Western Costume to deconstruct and customize heels, making them feel more appropriate for the 1950s. “Manolo Blahniks were the shoes that fit well, but it was well outside our budget, so I went on The RealReal,” says Johnson. “He would rip the whole thing apart until he just had the skeleton of the shoe, then custom dye the leather and rewrap the heel.”
As the project gears up to hit Netflix this week, Johnson’s main takeaway, looking back, is just how influential Monroe’s body-hugging style continues to be—even on today’s megastars like Kim Kardashian, who famously wore Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress to this year’s Met Gala. “Marilyn was our bombshell of the ’50s, and I suppose now it’s Kim Kardashian,” says Johnson. “That silhouette is very Kim Kardashian—this unachievable, extreme, hyper-sexualized femininity.” When asked what she thought about Kardashian wearing Monroe’s original dress, Johnson was forthright. “I really think those clothes shouldn’t be worn,” she says, adding that she did at one point consider pulling archival pieces but quickly decided against it. “We did not have access granted, nor would I have necessarily wanted that responsibility to have that clothing—it would have been amazing to investigate the construction of it closely, though.”
That skintight, nude-toned dress that Kardashian adopted as her own, however, is exactly what Johnson describes as best defining Monroe’s style. As Johnson puts it, Monroe’s clothes were essentially like a second skin. “Sometimes you don’t even notice what she’s wearing,” she says. “It was always about her hair and her body. You could almost imagine her naked.”
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix1/4
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix2/4
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix3/4
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix4/4
