Kim Kardashian's Monroe moment at the Met Gala shows money, influence and Instagram can get you what should be untouchable

When the Australian-born costume designer Orry-Kelly was locking horns with Marilyn Monroe on the fraught set of Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot, the foolhardy costumier made the mistake of telling the superstar that Tony Curtis had a better-looking arse than her.

Marilyn — anxious, pregnant and drinking but still totally in command of her staggering charisma — is said to have pulled open her blouse and responded, “but Tony Curtis doesn’t have tits like these”.

Orry-Kelly at least did Marilyn the favour of making her costumes that were the fantastical realisation of sexual desire.

Sewn to her body and clinging like smoke (she apparently had to be lifted onto the piano to sing “I’m Through with Love” so tight was the dress) his sheer souffle silk was encrusted with fine beads and sequins rising up her body to finish just at her nipples.

The dresses were considered by some to be outrageous at the time — and they still are. I remember re-watching Some Like it Hot with my stepson many years ago, and hearing him gasp as Marilyn threw off her stole to reveal a dress so magically sheer and barely opaque — and this was 2010.

When reality TV star Kim Kardashian inched her way up the stairs of the Metropolitan Museum in New York for the Costume Institute’s 2022 Gala, she was wearing the dress in which Marilyn next caused an international provocation: the “nude” Jean Louis beaded dress she wore to President John F Kennedy’s birthday in 1962.

The theme of the gala was Gilded Glamour, a reference to New York’s post-Civil War boom-time of aggressive entrepreneurs, robber-baron arrivistes and pushy social climbers.

If ever anyone nailed the brief of that event, it was this young woman in a famous dress that didn't fit her, raided from a museum that should have known better.

The moment was a perfect match: the Kardashians are our best representation of this new gilded age — where money, influence and Instagram can get you anything, including priceless heritage.

The Gilded Age madams just had dresses made to fit the décor of their mansions; the Kardashians want to get their hands on a bit of Camelot.

Some were aghast

Conservators and historians were aghast that something as fragile and important as that dress had been taken out of its temperature-controlled museum and loaned for the sole purpose of a photo opportunity. 

As someone who has spent many years around museums and art collections, I can tell you the only contact this kind of stuff usually ever has with the human body is a pair of white gloved hands carefully moving it from one casement to another.

The delicate dress was too small (requiring Kardashian to crash diet and boast about it) and too long, and as I saw her inch sideways up the stairs in chunky acrylic heels to give her the required height, I swear I could hear that miraculously fine silk scream under the stress.

The Fashion Institute described the act as “irresponsible and unnecessary” given that a copy of the dress had already been made for the celebrity, and they described the gown as crucial heritage.

But can you imagine how difficult it would have been for a High Street museum like Ripleys Believe it or Not, to say no to a phone call from a Kardashian?

Not even the Nuclear Wintour, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, could in the end say no to the Kardashians attending the Met Gala after she excluded them for years, regarding them as too vulgar.

(Turns out the Ripley’s museum even gave Kardashian a lock of Marilyn’s hair. The curatorial ethics of all of this is baffling.)

A moment to take stock

Why does it matter?

I remember when the Kennett government won office in Victoria, and as is tradition, the NGV invited the MPs to select a few works from its collection for their office walls.

A guffawing curator told me that the requests rolled in for major works by Streeton, Nolan and McCubbin -- including his most iconic painting, Down on His Luck. It had to be politely explained to MPs revelling in the trappings of power that, no, we didn’t mean those paintings.

Many of these museums may be filled with the old junk of old white men – and in the case of the Met, quite a bit of loot that is past time being returned home – but I want to make a case for the guardians and the keepers and the watchers on the towers as the irresistible wave of influence and celebrity bears down upon them.

As the Basquiat curator Chaedria LaBouvier noted, it’s an example of the fact that we cannot tell people who have everything – no.

It might be a good moment for the curators and the gate-keepers and the scholars to take stock: give back what isn’t yours, keep safe what is. And for history’s sake, keep the robber barons from the door.

Have a safe and happy weekend and with the news that Arcade Fire, the cinematic Canadian rock band, is returning to headline the Falls Festival this New Year’s Eve, take a moment to note how time and tide mellows us all. Yes, this is a little more sentimental than is my habit – but you can’t have too much of that right now, yes?

Go well.

Virginia Trioli is presenter on Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne and a co-presenter of Q&A.