“Want to feel cosy, comfortable and a little bit French? Try a sweater dress,” Jess Cartner-Morley writes in The Guardian. “Look up Marilyn Monroe in Let’s Make Love, Brigitte Bardot on the set of Two Weeks in September, or Gigi Hadid at 2019’s CFDA awards. One of these should convince you, if I haven’t.”
While the oversized cable-knit sweater worn by Marilyn for her ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy‘ number in Let’s Make Love wasn’t technically a dress, it certainly impressed leading man Yves Montand – especially when she whipped it off to reveal a diaphanous black unitard. In 2010, the sweater was recreated by French designer Gerard Darel, who had acquired the original at Christie’s in 1999.
Author Gary Vitacco Robles recounted the story of Marilyn’s sweater in the second volume of his epic biography, Icon: The Life, Times and Films of Marilyn Monroe.
“The blue sweater, ordered by Dorothy Jeakins from Ireland for $75, created more controversy on the set than Marilyn. ‘What you paid your money to see Marilyn in on the screen you would never see in that sweater with those tights underneath it,’ said Rupert Allan. ‘She rehearsed in it and every time she wore it, it got another inch longer.’ The wardrobe department made the mistake of ordering only one sweater, and [George] Cukor had to shoot other scenes while a replacement was knitted in western Ireland. Fox eventually air-expressed four extra sweaters to the wardrobe department.”
The Marilyn Report 