THE LOST DRESSES OF MARILYN MONROE

There is a photograph that almost everybody in the world has seen, and almost nobody thinks of as a photograph. A woman standing over a subway grate on Lexington Avenue, holding down a white dress that has decided to have a life of its own. We remember the woman, we remember the dress, and we forget entirely that somebody was standing there with a camera deciding when to press the shutter.

 

I think about that image more often than I probably should, and always for the same reason. That dress was not an accident. It was designed, cut and sewn by a man called William Travilla, and everything that makes the picture work was decided long before anyone turned up with a camera. The way the pleats catch the air. The way the white holds its shape against the dark of the street. The way the fabric explains the movement instead of hiding it.

 

Travilla dressed Marilyn Monroe in eight films. He won an Oscar in 1950, and he spent the rest of his career being known for a handful of dresses that outlived everyone involved in making them. When he died in Los Angeles in 1990, his private collection did not go to a museum. It went to his partner, Bill Sarris, who kept the dresses under lock and key for years, in part to protect Monroe’s memory from the circus that surrounded anything with her name on it. People in the business started calling them the Lost Collection, because that is what they were. Everyone knew they existed and nobody could see them.

 

They finally came to the UK in October 2007. Six dresses, shown for a week at the Hilton Brighton Metropole in aid of Alzheimer’s charities, because by then Sarris himself was living with the disease. The white dress from The Seven Year Itch was there. So was the pink satin from Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, the purple from How to Marry a Millionaire, the gold lamé, the red sequins. And a halter neck that Travilla had made for her personally, that was never a costume for anything, that she simply owned and wore. The exhibition travelled around the country afterwards and I remember the fuss it caused every time it landed somewhere new.

 

Why a wedding photographer should care about a costume designer

 

Because half of my job is photographing a dress, and I did not understand that for the first few years I was doing it.

 

When you start out you think you are photographing a person. Then you photograph enough weddings to notice that the dress is the only object in the room that everybody has an opinion about, that has been chosen over months, that has been altered three times, that somebody’s mother cried about in a shop in a city far from here. It carries an amount of feeling that no other thing in the day comes close to. And it behaves in front of a camera in ways that have very little to do with the bride and a great deal to do with whoever cut it.

 

This is the thing Travilla understood better than almost anyone: a dress is not a still object that happens to move. It is a moving object that happens to be still sometimes. He cut for the moment when the fabric would leave the body, not for the moment when it hangs. The subway scene works because the dress was built to do exactly that and nothing else. It is, in the most literal sense, a garment designed to be photographed in motion.

 

Once you see that, you cannot unsee it at a wedding. The heavy mikado that looks magnificent standing at the top of the aisle and turns into a bell that swings a beat behind its owner when she walks. The silk crepe that does nothing at all in a photograph until somebody opens a door and lets the air in. The tulle that is invisible in flat light and becomes the whole picture the moment you put a window behind it. None of this is about the bride. It is about what the maker decided, years earlier, in a workroom.

 

White is not a colour, it is a problem

 

The other lesson from that collection is less romantic and more useful. Look at the six dresses together and the first thing you notice is that Travilla almost never trusted white to do the work on its own. Pink satin, purple satin, gold lamé, red sequins. Materials chosen because they hold light rather than throw it back at you.

 

A wedding dress does not have that luxury. It is white, or something pretending to be white, and white is the single hardest thing to photograph well. It is the brightest object in almost every frame you will shoot all day, which means it decides your exposure whether you like it or not. Underexpose to protect it and the faces go dark. Expose for the faces and the dress turns into a white shape with no detail, no texture, no evidence that anybody spent eight months choosing it.

 

The answer, for me, has never been technical. It is where you stand and when you shoot. Light that arrives from the side gives fabric somewhere to cast a shadow, and shadow is the only thing that tells the eye whether it is looking at silk, lace or crepe. Late afternoon light does it for free. Midday sun does the opposite and there is no file on earth that will bring back what it has burned away. This is why I fight so hard, at every wedding, for twenty unhurried minutes at the right hour of the day. Not because I want a certain kind of picture, but because that is when the dress finally becomes readable.

 

The dress outlives everybody

 

Here is what really stays with me about the Lost Collection. Travilla is gone. Monroe has been gone since 1962. The photographers who shot those films are gone. The dresses are still here, in a crate somewhere, being lent out to exhibitions and insured for amounts that would buy a house.

 

And every so often, a bride’s daughter opens a wardrobe.

 

I have photographed enough weddings by now to have seen a dress come round twice. A mother’s gown taken in at the waist for a daughter thirty years later, worn to a different church in a different country, and the photographs from the first wedding brought out and put on a table next to the cake. Those old pictures are usually terrible by any technical standard. Flash straight on, colours gone orange, the whole thing slightly out of focus. Nobody cares. They are the most looked-at photographs in the room.

 

That is the part of this job that I try not to lose sight of when I am worrying about light and lenses and whether the ceremony is running late. The dress will outlive the wedding. The photographs will outlive the dress. Somebody who has not been born yet is going to look at what I made last Saturday and try to work out what their grandmother was like.

 

Travilla spent his life making things for a camera that he knew would be pointed at somebody else. He did it so well that seventy years later we still argue about a white dress on a subway grate. That is not a bad standard to work to.