“It was her concept completely,” says Mackie on the creation of one of the most famous dresses of all time, the sheer, beaded, body-hugging gown in which she breathlessly sang Happy Birthday to President John F Kennedy in 1962, fuelling rumours of their affair and casting a siren’s song enchantment over most of America’s male population at the same time.
Mackie, who grew up in the golden age of the MGM starlets in suburban Monterey Park, south-east of central Los Angeles, was on a scholarship at a local art school but had written to one of the leading costume designers in Hollywood, Jean Louis, to ask whether he needed any assistants. As it happens, Louis was working on an unseen Monroe movie named Something’s Got to Give, which never finished production, in 1962. Louis asked Mackie to draw a sketch for a gown to be worn by the star. “I created this idea of a beaded dress,” he recalls, and the idea grew from there.
“She had a huge input into the final version that we created. She wanted a little spaghetti strap dress that was sort of see-through, a little transparent. They had cut crystals to have holes in them, to sew them directly on to the fabric,” says Mackie of the process of bringing the dazzling piece to life. “She was fighting the studio, 20th Century Fox, to have sexier, more seductive dresses in her movies. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes they actually created dresses for her that were like that, and the studio wouldn’t allow her to wear them.” He never met Monroe, describing himself as “the boy in the backroom”, but says of her allure at that time (actually, of all time): “She really knew who she was, and she liked being that person. She was a creature of sorts, creating a character. She was truly one of a kind.”
The dress, created in sheer gauze and hand-sewn with 2,500 crystal rhinestones, lives on in the public consciousness, a talisman and physical symbol of Monroe’s sexuality and vulnerability.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk ’
