Marilyn’s ‘Happy Birthday Mr President’ dress – designed by Hollywood costumer Jean Louis using thousands of beaded Swarovski crystals – was purchased for $4.8 million in 2016, making it the most expensive dress ever sold at auction at the time. Since then it has been showcased at Ripley’s museums and even supermarkets across North America, and was controversially worn by Kim Kardashian to the Met Gala in 2022.
For the next few days, however, Marilyn’s ‘birthday dress’ is on display at 6400 West Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, as part of the exhibition, Swarovski: Masters of Light, as José Criales-Unzueta reports for Vogue.
“It’s one of several spectacular pieces of fashion and costume history that have been included in the latest iteration of Swarovski’s Masters of Light exhibition, which has been curated by the British fashion journalist and well-regarded ‘fashion geek’ (his words) Alexander Fury, in collaboration with Giovanna Engelbert, the Austrian house’s global creative director.
This ‘Masters of Light’ is honouring 130 years of Swarovski, while also celebrating its enduring presence in fashion and film costuming, and, of course, on celebrities! Fury has included everything from a parure worn by Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Harry Styles’s Egonlab jumpsuit from the 2023 Grammy’s to a fall 2002 couture bridal gown from Christian Lacroix famously worn by Madonna and even the crown worn by Ariana Grande’s Glinda in Wicked.
The exhibition is arranged across two main spaces, one devoted to ‘Silver Screen Style’ and featuring film costumes in conversation with fashion ensembles, and another focusing on ‘Pop Icons,’ meaning pieces worn by stars. Most memorable are the pieces Fury has selected that serve as cultural touchpoints across different moments in history. The famous ‘naked dress’ by Jean Louis worn by Marilyn Monroe in 1962 has its own dedicated room … Here, Fury discusses the making of the exhibition, and shares key details that are sure to delight his fellow fashion fanatics.
‘This is the third exhibition I’ve done with Swarovski. Masters of Light first opened in 2023 in Shanghai, and then we did an iteration last year in Milan. We brought it this time to Los Angeles, and because of the change of location, there’s a change of theme. Coming to LA, it has to be around cinema.’
Looking at the pieces in the exhibition, it’s really impressive to see how omnipresent Swarovski is.
‘Swarovski has an archive in a place called Wattens, which is where they’re based. When they would work with designers, a lot of the time they would have them either replicate an outfit or donate the outfit to them … The earliest piece is from the House of Worth from 1895 to 1900. So it’s literally the first five years of Swarovski, and they were supplying Worth at that point. They started at the top of the game. They were working with Josephine Baker in the 1930s. They were working with MGM and Paramount, and Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.’
Before you went to the archive and before you started digging, was there something that you thought: this has to be in it?
‘When we started talking about it, and we came up with the idea, it was actually Giovanna who said, I think it would be great if we tried to do fashion and costume. And I was like, okay, let’s have a think. I started to research and see what costumes were around, and I found this amazing costume collector called Larry McQueen. He’s got a costume collection. It’s all online, it’s all documented, photographed and available online. And he’s just released a book. I can’t even remember how I stumbled onto it, but it was to the point where I was checking if it was real, because it was so unreal. He had the Cleopatra costume worn by Elizabeth Taylor. And he’s a bit like me. We are two men who spend all of our money on women’s dresses [laughs]. I found that he had the Dietrich dress. Now, Greta Garbo is great. Marilyn Monroe is great. But I live for Dietrich as the person I’ve been obsessed with since I was a teenager … We’ve got to have these different representations. It’s showing that there’s a whole sort of Swarovski universe. Anyone can wear Swarovski. Anyone can sparkle.
Don’t you love it when someone gives you a great last line?
‘Yes. That’s a last line [laughs].'”
The Marilyn Report 