Mark DeCastro
Clothing Artifact Project First Draft
Fashion is one of humanity’s most fickle creations. What is stylish or trendy today may be completely out of style tomorrow, however, fashion posses a unique ability to capture and preserve an era of time. For instance, a flapper dress reminds us of the 1920’s, while a poodle skirt reminds us of the 1950’s and so forth. Beyond its ability to preserve cultural values and trends fashion can preserve historical moments for proof look to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ pink Chanel suit with a matching pillbox hat and how it is forever linked to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination. The assassination of a president is a shocking and notorious event in the history of the world but fashion does not just remember those events, it becomes linked to movements as well. One such dress is that which was worn by Marilyn Monroe for President John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday gala held in Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962. The dress was designed by French costume designer Jean Louis who had previously worked on films such as Gilda in which Rita Hayworth does a striptease in a black satin dress—this is important because it may speak to a pattern of objectification of women who wore his dresses. Jean Louis created a full length evening sheath dress of flesh-colored soufflé gauze encrusted with graduated rhinestones embroidered in a rosette motif, however under the bright lights of Madison Square Garden Marilyn appeared almost nude. This dress is politically important because it objectified Marilyn Monroe’s body for the pleasure of men; that speaks to the culture of the early 1960’s in which women were subordinate to men.
This dress is currently owned by the museum chain Ripley’s Believe it or not, home to whacky, absurd, and well unbelievable. It is very telling that this dress would be displayed next to figurines of the worlds tallest man and a two headed cow. Additionally the museum chain paid five million dollars for this gown making the most expensive dress every purchased to date. As previously stated, Jean Louis created a full length evening sheath dress of flesh-colored soufflé gauze encrusted with graduated rhinestones embroidered in a rosette motif but he did not use diamonds or solid gold to construct this dress. If the materials do not have any inherent value why is this dress so valuable?
One obvious reason is because of Marilyn’s status as a cultural icon. But upon closer inspection this dress is also important because it exemplifies how she was a victim of toxic masculinity, sadly she was just one of many women in that time who faced this societal discrimination. A man created this dress to make a woman appear nude, it was so tight that she could barely walk in it and had to be sewn into it, this was not a dress that was designed for comfort, it was a dress created to display her assets.
This was not the first time that designer Jean Louis created a gown such as this. His previous work include the black gown in which Rita Hayworth was forced to do a strip tease, a barely there ensemble that only covered Kim Novak’s breasts in the 1957 film Jeanne Eagles. Jean was not just a perpetuator of female objectification, he was an instigator. Countless of his designs displayed the female body in a sexual light.
Consequentially, this dress preserves the attitude towards women at the time. Just a few months after Marilyn wore this dress she was found dead and just a few years after Marilyn wore this dress second wave feminism became a prevalent social movement in America. These events do not seem divorced from one another, instead, they are inextricably connected. The dress represented toxic masculinity while Marilyn Monroe represented femininity and sexuality, that contrast and her untimely death can lead modern interpreters to believe that the cultural climate in which she lived could have had a negative impact on her mental health.
The 1960’s were a time of societal turbulence, in this decade alone there were massive demonstrations and protests such as the Freedom Summer of 1964, the Civil Rights movement, the Gay Rights Movement, Second Wave Feminism, not to mention the assassination of a president and world leader in John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. respectively. It is important to understand the mindset of the general public when determining the political importance of fashion because the garment was created for a reason, in a specific time, and with specific intentions. To better understand why Marilyn’s gown is of political significance we must first examine the outside world.
While toxic masculinity is a relatively new term it defines a thought process that is almost as old as civilization itself. It is culturally understood that toxic masculinity was the societal norm of the 1960s. Existential philosopher Martin Heidegger said that “the absence of something defines it’s presence” toxic masculinity can almost exclusively be defined by what it is not. Men who are afraid of being inadequate or not manly enough have historically overcompensated for their perceived deficits by becoming hyper masculine; this can be seen by men who catcall women or use positions of power/authority to extort sexual favors from their subordinates. In addition to sexual harassment and abuse, other toxic masculine norms include but not limited to domineering behavior, degradation of women, and the suppression of emotions which perpetuates many male stereotypes. These stereotypes can include “real men don’t cry” or other sexist phrases such as “man up.” Other toxic traits of these specific men include: misogyny, homophobia, and violence. These traits are thought of as toxic because they are psychologically and physically detrimental to the other members of society in which these men live. The suppression of emotions is correlated to self harm as a result of rising mental disorders such as depression, increased stress, and substance abuse. These mental defects are all linked: a man feels insecure so he overcompensates for his insecurities and the consequences of these overcompensations are aggression, joy at the humiliation of others, excessive pride in appearances.
Toxic masculinity is a social construction, in no other life form is it found; it is the result of overly conscious beings. Toxic masculinity is a learned behavior that is passed on through generations of boys only clubs in a fashion that is similar to how bigotry and racism are grown through social interactions. This connects to the dress that Marilyn wore because it describes how the dress and she were viewed. Many men viewed her as a conquest, and the dress as something that should be ripped off. The circumstance in which she wore this dress are extraordinary. No only was she in a room filled with dignitaries but also the leader of the free world. All of whom were lusting over this gown.
If Marilyn chose to wear this gown of her own agency because it made her feel empowered she could be considered a feminist however she was dressed by a man for the benefit of other men. Often times in today’s society feminism is a concept that most people fail to fully understand. A common misconception of feminism is that Feminism has been described as having three separate waves. The First Wave Feminist Movement started in the mid-19th Century and culminated with the women's suffrage movement. Second wave feminism started in the late 1950s moved into the 1980s. Historians and feminist/gender scholars describe today’s feminist theory, ideology and social/political movement as the third wave of feminism. The ‘’second wave’’ of feminism started after the women were forced out of the workplace after end of World War Two and essentially ended with the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Second-wave feminism splintered after criticism grew that the movement had focused on white women to the the exclusion of everyone else.
The women's movement before the 1920s was characterized by the suffrage movement that led to women gaining the right to vote. From the 1890s and early part of the 20th century, much of the women's movement focused on general societal inequalities and, such as poor working and housing conditions, while also focusing on social ills such as alcoholism and prostitution. Black women in the Southwest of the United States, during the 1930s, for instance, joined labor unions such as the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) to protest poor wages and work environments they had to endure. [1] Apart from this general social activism and gaining the right to vote, gender-specific topics, including equality in work and pay, were not major focus areas.
In the 1940s, women gained increasing employment as men left overseas to fight in World War II. In fact, it was World War II that can be argued as the major trigger for the second wave feminist movement that occurred after the war. During the war years, the labor unions that had grown in the 1930s became even stronger as women became increasingly employed, particularly in manufacturing jobs required to support the war effort. During the 1940s, new work benefits became available to women, including maternity leave, daycare, and counseling. These benefits developed more substantially in Europe, as many countries there were devastated by war, where much of the male population was reduced.[2] Nevertheless, in the United States, women's participation in the labor force in World War II created a feeling among many women, after the war ended, that they also deserved the same types of rights as men in jobs they filled. This was highlighted by the fact that many men who came back and retook their old jobs from women who were doing them during the war also were given higher salaries, further highlighting this inequality.[3]
In the 1950s, the economy began to expand and the height of the red scare or anti-communist sentiment began to diminish feminist organization. [4] However, by the early late 1950s and 1960s, as more prolonged prosperity took hold, there was greater interest to explore new ideas and movements emerged, including the civil rights movement, that began to question establish social constructs such as segregation and inequality in the work place. By the early 1960s, the social atmosphere began to be conducive for a major feminist movement.[5]
After World War II, some writers began to question how women in society were perceived and the role they played, particularly as the war had shown women made valuable contributions and in many cases performed tasks equally to me. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, a groundbreaking book that questioned how society viewed women and the role in which they played. In her work, Beauvoir writes, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This quote represent how society fosters the idea of what a woman should do and act, where gender roles are learned and forced upon women. [6] Where World War II showed that women could break out of their gender roles as was required; the book questioned then why should women's roles that saw them as secondary to men in the workplace and home be perpetuated when this was clearly not the case during the war.
After a period of time, the movement gained greater traction through more authors in the 1960s. Betty Friedan was perhaps one of the most influential writers at this time. After conducting a survey of her classmates, Friedan noticed that many of her classmates were unhappy in their marriages where their lives revolved around childcare and housework. This prompted her to write The Feminine Mystique in 1963 where she questioned white, middle class ideals of family life and motherhood, particularly as domestic life had stifled women and their aspirations. In her book, Friedan includes interviews with women who were unhappy in their home life, debunking the ideals of the 1950s that often showed a happy family with men at work and women focused on housework. The book fundamentally questioned if the 1950s ideals were in the best interest of women.[7]
The book and politics in the 1960s led to some initial victories for the emerging second wave women's movement. This includes the establishment of the National Organization for Women, where Friedan joined the organization, and the first great legislative victory, which was the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. This made it law for women to have an equal right to equal pay for the same jobs that men did. It made it now possible for women to now not be prevented from joining the labor force due to depressed wages.[8] Other changes, including the introduction of the contraceptive pill and introduction of abortion in Europe began to have political ramifications. The pill, on the one hand, allowed women to delay childbirth and establish careers in many cases. Abortion also gave women greater choices about rearing children.[9]
In 1969, Katy Millett wrote Sexual Politics and wrote about the patriarchal structure of society that controls sex, sexual expression, and ultimately politics and the narrative of political discourse. Sex and gender oppression are common because of political discourse found in society. Millets argued that before any other type of oppression existed, elite men first oppressed people based on sex and gender, extending later to race and class.
In the 1970s, the second wave feminist movement expanded and continued to gain momentum. Carol Hanisch published an essay in 1970 titled "The Personal is Political.” Hanisch argued that everything was political, including division of household labor, gender roles, and other day-to-day activities. If a women decided to have an abortion and get a job as a woman in a male dominated industry, then that decision has political consequences and became politicized in society. Women had to bring their private, household problems into the public sphere because issues were politicized and had consequence far outside of an individual. [1
Working Bibliography
Cochrane, Kira. "1963: The Beginning of the Feminist Movement." The Guardian. May 07,
2013. Accessed October 20, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/may/
07/1963-beginning-feminist-movement.
Ellen, Barbara. "You Can't Dress up What Happened to Poor Marilyn Monroe | Barbara Ellen."
The Guardian. November 20, 2016. Accessed October 16, 2018. https://
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/20/marilyn-monroe-dress-happy-
birthday-mr-president.
Liu, William Ming. "Supplemental Material for Assessing the Impact of the Psychology of Men
& Masculinity, 2000–2008." Psychology of Men & Masculinity, January 2010. doi:
10.1037/a0018033.supp.
Nickens, Christopher, and George Zeno. Marilyn in Fashion: The Enduring Influence of Marilyn
Monroe. Philadelphia, Pa: Running Press, 2012.
"The 1960s: A Decade of Change for Women." U.S. News & World Report. Accessed October
12, 2018. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2010/03/12/the-1960s-a-decade-of-
change-for-women.
Thomson, David. "'Happy Birthday, Mr President': The Story of Marilyn Monroe and That
Dress." The Guardian. November 03, 2016. Accessed October 10, 2018. https://
www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/03/happy-birthday-mr-president-the-story-of-
marilyn-monroe-and-that-dress.
James Gilbert, Men in the Middles, Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005.
M. Megan Kelly, Projections of Passing. Postwar Anxieties and Hollywood Films, 1947-1960,
Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016.