FASHION’S biggest night doesn’t happen on the runway, but instead, on the carpeted steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the first Monday of May.
Kim Kardashian is just one of the celebrities whose extravagant outfits never disappoint, but one of her most show-stopping looks to date – Marilyn Monroe’s iconic Happy Birthday, Mr. President dress – also caused its fair share of controversy at the 2022 Met Gala.
What was Kim Kardashian’s Marilyn Monroe dress at the Met Gala?
Kim Kardashian stole the show at the 2022 Met Gala, and it wasn’t because of her platinum-blonde locks or the arm candy – her boyfriend at the time, Pete Davidson – at her side.
Kardashian attended the Met Gala wearing the exact dress Marilyn Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy.
Monroe wore the Jean Louis gown during JFK’s 45th birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden in 1962, which quickly cemented its iconic status.
Jean Louis was a French-American costume designer known best for dressing movie stars on screen and the red carpet.
Louis hired fellow costume designer Bob Mackie to sketch the gown, which was skintight, sheer, and sparkly.
The dress was intended to be a nude color, matching Monroe’s skin tone to give off the illusion that she wasn’t wearing anything apart from discretely placed rhinestones throughout the look.
The translucent look was embellished with thousands of hand-placed and hand-stitched crystals and stones.
Monroe reportedly paid around $1,440 for the dress.
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Until Kardashian got her hands on the dress, the iconic look had never been worn by anyone besides Monroe herself.
Who styled Kim Kardashian for the 2022 Met Gala?
Kim Kardashian has an arsenal of stylists at her disposal, but the reality star and SKIMS founder reportedly concocted the idea to wear Marilyn Monroe’s iconic dress all by herself.
“The idea really came to me after the gala in September last year,” Kardashian told Vogue.
“I thought to myself, what would I have done for the American theme if it had not been the Balenciaga look?”
“What’s the most American thing you can think of? And that’s Marilyn Monroe,” she added.
“For me the most Marilyn Monroe moment is when she sang “Happy Birthday,” to JFK, it was that look.”
“Nowadays everyone wears sheer dresses, but back then that was not the case,” says Kardashian.
“In a sense, it’s the original naked dress. That’s why it was so shocking.”
Kim recalls trying on a replica of a dress in Orlando, Florida, before the original was flown out to her home in Calabasas, California.
Despite the replica fitting, the original version – which needed to be tried on with gloves – didn’t, causing Kim to panic, as she didn’t have a backup option.
“It was this or nothing,” she told Vogue.
Kardashian then went on a strict diet and exercise routine and reportedly lost 16 pounds in just a few weeks.
When she tried on the gown again a month later in Orlando, it fit like a glove.
Still, given the “fragile nature and historical value of the dress,” Kim only wore the original for a few minutes, walking up the steps of the Met Gala.
She then quickly changed into a replica of the iconic look – also owned by Ripley’s – for the remainder of the evening, allowing her to sit, dance, eat, and move around as she pleased.
“I’m extremely respectful to the dress and what it means to American history,” she told Vogue.
“I would never want to sit in it or eat in it or have any risk of any damage to it and I won’t be wearing the kind of body makeup I usually do.”
To complete the look, celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton was Kim Kardashian’s go-to hair guru for the event.
Appleton spent 14 hours transforming Kim’s dark locks into an icy, platinum-blonde look.
“I love a blonde Kim,” Appleton told E! News.
“I think it’s so interesting how a color can change the colors of the clothes you wear and it really changes your makeup.”
“You can really reinvent things,” he added.
“We had a fast turnaround because we had to get it done for the Met, but it was lots of conditioning treatments in between each setting and lightening the process.”
“My technique really is all about taking very fine sections of hair and lightening the process with just very fine sections back to back,” he said.
“It’s definitely not just about putting a color on all over and hoping for the best.”
“It really is quite an approach that you have to plan it with. I go about that very particularly,” he added.
Who owns the Marilyn Monroe ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President’ dress?
Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress was originally auctioned off in New York in October 1999, along with the bulk of her estate.
Martin Zweig, a financial investor, purchased the gown and kept it mounted on a mannequin in a “climate-controlled display in his New York penthouse,” as reported by Vulture.
A few years after Zweig passed away, the dress hit the auction block again along with his estate, this time in Los Angeles.
The dress was sold for upwards of $5 million – the most expensive dress ever sold at an auction – to an unlikely buyer.
Canadian billionaire Jim Pattinson, owner of Ripley Entertainment and the Guinness World Records, purchased the dress on behalf of one of his companies, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!
While the dress was briefly on display in Luseland, Saskatchewan, it was moved to a secure vault in Ripley’s Orlando museum.
Amanda Joiner, a Ripley executive, stressed that while the museum allowed Kardashian to wear the look, there were “a lot of requirements in place” for her to do so.
For instance, the dress was “always with a Ripley’s representative,” and never with Kim Kardashian alone.
“We always ensured that at any time we felt that the dress was in danger of ripping or we felt uncomfortable about anything, we always had the ability to be able to say we were not going to continue with this,” Joiner added.
After Kim wore the look on the Met Gala’s red carpet, she thanked Ripley’s on her X, formerly Twitter, account.
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“Thank you Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for giving me the opportunity to debut this evocative piece of fashion history for the first time since the late Marilyn Monroe wore it,” Kim tweeted.
“I am forever grateful for this moment,” she added.
