By Lori Perkins
I lost interest in the Met Gala when the draft of Supreme Court’s end to abortion decision was leaked Monday night, but I had been mildly entertained by Kim Kardashian’s cos-play as Marilyn Monroe. I saw how hard it was for her to even walk in the skin-tight, bejeweled gown, as boyfriend Pete Davidson, sporting his newly controversial neck tattoos of her children’s initials, helped her mince up the red carpet.
And I was a little annoyed that everyone seemed to be making such a big deal about her “homage” to Monroe. As far as I was concerned, Madonna did it better 40 years ago, but Kim looked pretty classy and I liked the blond hair on her. I thought that was it. Stories about Kim Kardashian’s Marilyn Monroe dress kept on traveling over my social media feed, but I was too agitated with losing the right to control my body to read the gossip pages until I saw the headline of today’s L.A. Times, “Conservators ‘speechless’ that Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s dress to Met Gala.” I was speechless too.
I was totally unaware that Kim Kardasdian was actually wearing the actual dress that Marilyn Monroe wore 60 years ago when she sang happy Birthday to JFK (a few months before she died). The dress had been lent to Kardashian by Ripley’s Believe It or Not and is worth $10 million. Kim wanted to wear it because she considered it “the original naked dress.”
When Monroe wore it, she had to be sewn into it. Kardasdian said she didn’t originally fit into the gown and lost 16 pounds for the event because she wasn’t allowed to alter the dress. According to the L.A. Times, after taking photos in the dress, she changed into a copy of the gown for the gala.