White dress of Marilyn Monroe
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| Designer | William Travilla |
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| Year | 1955 |
| Type | White ivory cocktail dress |
Marilyn Monroe wore a white dress in the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch, directed by Billy Wilder. The dress was created by costume designer William Travilla and was worn in one of the best-known scenes in the movie. The dress is regarded as an icon of film history and the image of Monroe in the white dress standing above a subway grating blowing the dress up has been described as one of the iconic images of the 20th century.
When the costume designer William Travilla, known simply as Travilla, began working with Marilyn Monroe, he had already won an Oscar for his work in The Adventures of Don Juan in 1948. When Travilla began working with Monroe in 1952 in Don't Bother to Knock, he was still one of the many costume designers of 20th Century Fox. Travilla designed the clothes of the actress in eight films, and according to his revelation, also had a brief affair. In 1955 he designed the white cocktail dress worn by Marilyn Monroe while his wife Dona Drake was on vacation. It remains his most famous work. According to Hollywood Costume: Glamour! Glitter! Romance! by Dale McConathy and Diana Vreeland, Travilla did not design the dress but actually bought it off the rack (although the costume designer always denied this claim).
In the film, the white dress appears in the sequence in which Marilyn Monroe and co-star Tom Ewell exit the Trans-Lux 52nd Street Theatre, then located at 586 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, having just watched the 1954 horror film Creature from the Black Lagoon. When they hear a subway train passing below the grate in the sidewalk, Monroe's character steps onto the grate saying "Ooo, do you feel the breeze from the subway?", as the wind blows the dress up exposing her legs. Originally the scene had been scheduled to shoot on the street outside the Trans-Lux at 1:00 am on 15 September 1954. However, the presence of the actress and the movie cameras caught the curiosity of hundreds of fans, so the director Billy Wilder was forced to reshoot the moment on a set at 20th Century Fox. The depiction of Monroe over the grate has been compared to a similar event in the 1901 short film What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City. It has also been described as one of the iconic images of the entire 20th century.
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