Inside a white conservation room at Los Angeles’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the most famous pink dress in Hollywood has been turned over and opened up, like a patient mid operation. The shocking pink gown Marilyn Monroe wore while singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—the one that inspired Madonna’s “Material Girl,” Ryan Gosling’s 2024 Oscar-night Ken fantasia, and countless drag tributes and Halloween costumes—is being carefully examined ahead of its return to public view as the centerpiece of “Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon” (May 31, 2026, through February 28, 2027), an exhibition marking Monroe’s centennial.

Up close, stripped of klieg lights and Technicolor illusion, the dress reveals itself to be far stranger—and far more vulnerable—than its legend suggests. For one thing, it is not simply pink. Beneath the famous confection of peau d’ange silk is a graphic slash of black, a contrast strip that slices down the back like a little jolt of noir beneath all that candy-colored glamour. And what reads onscreen as one giant bow is, in reality, a complex arrangement of folds and pleats, black lined and engineered into the dress itself.

Inside, there are still traces of the number: stains from several days of filming, signs of strain at the seams, and evidence of costume designer William Travilla’s urgent tinkering as he worked to make the gown move with Monroe’s body while surviving the heat of the lights.

“The design is brilliant,” Academy Museum associate curator Sophia Serrano tells Vogue. “But the actual quality of it is not made to last beyond the filming of that number.”

That is the delicious contradiction at the heart of the gown: One of the most immortal dresses in film history was, materially speaking, a rush job.

The original costume for “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” was meant to be a lavish showgirl affair, black and glittering and scandalously revealing—a sort of barely-there, burlesque fantasy in rhinestones and fishnet. Then Monroe’s nude calendar photographs resurfaced. She had posed for them years earlier, as Norma Jeane, for $50 because she needed rent money; by the early ’50s, however, Monroe was no longer an anonymous model but Fox’s dazzling new investment, coming off increasingly visible roles in All About Eve, The Asphalt Jungle, Monkey Business, and Niagara. The studio heads threw a fit.

Bryan Johns, owner of the dress and cofounder of the Icon Collection (a private archive of Hollywood costumes, personal effects, and other objects of the screen), sees Monroe’s rather modern response to the scandal as one of the defining moments of her public life. At a moment when studios manufactured spotless starlets and buried anything remotely scandalous, the actress simply told the truth.

“The studio immediately went into a panic, and they told her, ‘You need to deny this was you,’” Johns says. “She said, ‘Why would I do that? I did do it.’ She owned it.” (“I’m not ashamed of it,” Monroe told the United Press in 1952. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I was a week behind my rent. I had to have the money.”) But Fox still wanted Travilla to clean up Monroe’s image—and quickly. Johns estimates the designer had “maybe a week or two weeks” to produce an entirely new concept for the number.

Its frantic origins are still visible in the garment itself. Serrano says the pink dress “was made very, very quickly. You can see where it was workshopped.” Travilla experimented with different linings to create “just the right amount of push and pull when she moved,” cutting away and layering fabrics inside the seams for movement and just enough durability. “He really also was working with getting it so that it wasn’t too heavy or too hot,” Serrano says. “You can see a lot of substantial sweat stains on the inside.” For a gown so often flattened into a single immortal image—pink, diamonds, desire, Marilyn—the physical garment tells a far messier and more compelling story: of improvisation, pressure, panic, and cinematic sleight of hand.

Its afterlife, improbably enough, is nearly as dramatic as its creation. After leaving Fox, the dress was purchased by Michael Shaw, the legendary Hollywood collector who once owned another sacred relic of American film: Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Shaw acquired the Monroe gown directly from Fox for $12, plus another $2 for an “extra garment”—a pink alternate prototype, likely one of Travilla’s discards for the sequence, which will also appear in the Academy exhibition.

For decades afterward, however, the dress slipped into collector folklore. Rumors circulated that it had disappeared or been damaged or mistaken for one of the many reproductions made over the years. Johns—whose fascination with Monroe stretches back to a childhood encounter with a hidden Playboy centerfold (he still remembers asking his father who Monroe was, only to be told, simply, that she was “the ideal woman”)—had long wondered whether the original dress still existed at all. Then, while watching a documentary about the ruby slippers, he spotted something extraordinary in the background of footage from the early 1970s. “There it was,” he recalls. “The pink dress was on a mannequin. And I said, ‘Oh my gosh, it does exist. It did survive the film.’”

What followed was more detective work. Johns combed through auction catalogs from Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Bonhams, Heritage, and Profiles in History, looking not necessarily for the dress itself at first but for evidence that it had ever changed hands. By 2010, it appeared at Profiles in History’s Hollywood Auction 40, where an anonymous buyer purchased the dress for $310,000.

Eventually, Johns tracked down the family of the man who had purchased it at auction years earlier. The collector had since died; his son remembered only that his father had bought the dress for his wife. But several days after Johns called, the family found it—and ultimately agreed to part with it.

Serrano had already been working with Johns since 2019, borrowing pieces from the Icon Collection for the Academy Museum (including the red sequined gown Monroe wore opposite Jane Russell at the start of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—it appeared in the museum’s inaugural costume-design exhibition). But the pink dress altered the scale of her thinking entirely. “I saw the pink dress at his house, and it was then that I started conceptualizing an exhibition around it,” she says.

Serrano describes the dress as being placed in an “intimate, magical space,” surrounded by other chapters of Monroe’s carefully constructed mythology: the red Gentlemen Prefer Blondes gown, costumes from Some Like It Hot, annotated scripts, studio contracts, and objects from her Brentwood home.

The pink dress itself will be lit with a touch of cinematic trickery: From the front, the color will be heightened to evoke the hypersaturated glow of Technicolor; from the back, visitors will see something closer to how the dress appears in ordinary light. In other words, the museum is allowing the gown to perform two versions of itself at once: the fantasy and the fact.

Indeed, rather than trace Monroe’s life chronologically, “Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon” examines the many ways she shaped—and carefully controlled—her public image within (and sometimes in spite of) the studio system. “Everyone has seen images of Marilyn,” Serrano says, “but knows less about how carefully constructed they were.” Monroe reviewed contact sheets obsessively, selected images herself, crossed out negatives she disliked, and even cut up photographs she did not want reproduced. The exhibition mirrors that precision: Mannequins are 3D-printed renderings of Monroe’s body, the hair re-created style by style.

In “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” Monroe’s gold-digging Lorelei Lee descends a crimson staircase into a room full of men who seem to exist only to orbit her. Then, she does not so much dance as glide, gleam, and purr. Though Lorelei is often dismissed as a dumb blonde on the make, Monroe plays her as something far sharper: a woman who understands power, performance, and the economics of desire better than anyone in the room.

Vogue, in its August 15, 1953, issue, sensed the strange brilliance of the performance in real time, praising Monroe for proving that “in spite of Gobi Desert stretches of monotony,” she could entertain as well as “switch her rear and wiggle her mouth.” More than 70 years later, the pink dress remains less a symbol of fantasy than of Monroe’s extraordinary command over it.