Marilyn Monroe’s Personal Wool Suit

From the personal wardrobe of Marilyn Monroe, this black wool suit consists of a tailored jacket, matching skirt, and detachable mink fur collar. George Nardiello designed it in the mid 1950s, when he was working closely with Marilyn.

Nardiello had one consistent complaint about designing for Marilyn: she wanted everything skintight, like a slip. That meant reinforced seams and precision tailoring that most designers wouldn’t attempt. You can see his approach in this suit. The jacket and skirt are sharply cut and structured to fit her body exactly, with careful attention to how the seams move when she wore it.

Marilyn loved this suit. She wore it repeatedly across photo sessions, interviews, and public appearances. Milton Greene photographed her in it at least twice, including the famous session at Edward R. Murrow’s home before her celebrated television appearance. She wore the mink collar during an interview at Greene’s studio at 480 Lexington Avenue in New York. When she traveled to England in 1956 to film The Prince and the Showgirl, she wore it there too. Film footage shows her in it walking through New York City in 1955.

The pieces were added to the collection separately between 2006 and 2016, then reunited into the complete ensemble, restoring the suit as Marilyn originally wore it.

There’s one more detail: strands of Marilyn’s blonde hair remain in the wool of both the jacket and the skirt. It’s a quiet physical trace of wear that grounds this piece in her actual life.

The Ultimate Look at the Legend

An excerpt from Marilyn: The Ultimate Look at the Legend by James Haspiel in which he describes Marilyn wearing this mink collar:

On a mild mid-morning…I was walking towards the Gladstone and as I arrived at the entrance I came upon a teenager standing outside with an 8-mm camera aimed directly at the hotel’s revolving door, which was already in motion. Marilyn came awhirl through the door and literally performed a 360-degree turn for his home-movie camera. She was dressed in an elegant black suit with a fur collar, her lustrous hair shoulder length, and was fully made up. Dazzling! She was about to walk from 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue over to the Fifth Avenue beauty salon of Elizabeth Arden. So I walked side by side with her; naturally, to the utter frustration of this kid who was walking backwards with his movie camera pointed at us, because I was now unavoidably in all of his wonderful footage of Marilyn. In fact, although I sought him out over the following years, he never allowed me to see the candid film he took of Marilyn and me walking across town that day.

As she walked her famous walk in her very high black stiletto heels, cars and trucks just pulled over to the curb and drivers emerged from them shouting “Marilyn! Marilyn!” When we finally got the three blocks over to Fifth Avenue, we then had to walk uptown to 54th-55th Streets. As we arrived at the doorway to Elizabeth Arden’s salon, I heard the nearby sounds of an automobile crashing, and looked over to see a taxicab driver whose head was bobbing out of the passenger-side front window of his cab, the vehicle itself now embedded in the back end of a delivery truck! He had a gleeful smile on his face and was hollering, “Marilyn!” I tapped her on the shoulder and exclaimed “See what you did!” She gave me a very “Marilynesque” laugh and swept rather grandly into the salon.