Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Some Like It Hot’ Costumes Reunite on Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile

The Essence of Marilyn Still Lives Inside the Clothes

The essence of Marilyn Monroe lives in the costumes she wore—not because fabric can replace a woman, but because she understood how to make every seam, sparkle and strategically placed illusion perform alongside her.

Knowing these pieces now live just down the street from us feels almost too perfect. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures sits on Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile inside the former May Company department store, in an area built around glamour, shopping and the grand performance of being seen.

Now that same landmark holds two screen-worn Orry-Kelly costumes from Some Like It Hot, reunited within Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon—the museum’s centennial exhibition examining Monroe not only as a star, but as an actor and image-maker who helped construct the public figure the world still cannot stop looking at.

Two Orry-Kelly Costumes Share the Same Room Again

The Academy Museum lists the two Some Like It Hot costumes among the major highlights of the exhibition. Both were designed by Orry-Kelly, whose work on Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy won the Academy Award for black-and-white costume design.

Onscreen, the gowns appear to cling, shimmer and reveal almost more than a major studio should have allowed in 1959. That was the engineering. Orry-Kelly created clothing that amplified Monroe’s movement while helping Sugar Kane seem vulnerable, funny, knowingly seductive and completely in command of the frame.

These are not simply Marilyn-shaped dresses. They are surviving pieces of a performance. Without her inside them, the construction becomes easier to study—the illusion fabric, beadwork, support and practical choices required to create something that looked effortless beneath studio lights.

Then memory supplies the missing body. You can practically hear Sugar Kane’s breathy phrasing and see Monroe turning fabric into character.

Some Like It Hot Let Glamour Carry the Heartbreak

Some Like It Hot stars Monroe opposite Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Wilder’s comedy about two musicians who disguise themselves as women and join an all-female band while fleeing the mob.

Curtis and Lemmon receive the broad comic machinery, but Monroe’s Sugar Kane gives the film its ache. She is funny and impossibly glamorous, yet her character’s search for safety and a different life keeps the movie from becoming only a perfect string of jokes.

The Academy Museum describes the film as a high point during a year of dramatic highs and lows for Monroe. The costumes carry that tension. They present Sugar as fantasy while allowing Monroe’s emotional reality to flicker through the illusion.

That is why the dresses matter beyond auction value or celebrity worship. They preserve the physical decisions behind a performance audiences still respond to nearly seven decades later.

The Exhibition Gives Marilyn Credit for Creating Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon marks Monroe’s centennial by looking beyond the lazy idea that Hollywood invented her and she simply appeared.

The exhibition presents Monroe as a visionary actor and image-maker who shaped her public persona within—and frequently against—the classical studio system. Hundreds of objects include portraits, photographs, correspondence, production documents, personal materials and screen-worn costumes spanning from Love Happy in 1949 through her unfinished final film, Something’s Got to Give.

Another centerpiece is William Travilla’s famous pink gown from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Together, these objects show that cinematic immortality was not accidental. It was built through clothing, lighting, camera awareness, gesture and Monroe’s own understanding of what an image could do.

Marilyn was not only photographed. She understood photographs—and how every costume, angle and movement contributed to the woman the world believed it knew.

Miracle Mile Was Already Performing Before Hollywood Moved In

The location gives the exhibition another layer of Los Angeles history.

The Academy Museum occupies the restored 1939 May Company Wilshire building at Wilshire and Fairfax. The Streamline Moderne landmark was once one of the city’s grand department stores, with a black-and-gold façade and a curved corner designed to command attention from motorists heading west along Miracle Mile.

The building helped anchor an automobile-driven shopping district where architecture had to sell fantasy at windshield speed. Shopping itself became spectacle, and the department store became a stage for the modern Los Angeles identity.

Hollywood history did not arrive on Miracle Mile when the museum opened. The neighborhood had already been selling Los Angeles its own image for decades.

Today the former May Company sells no dresses, but it preserves the ones that helped define movie history. Somewhere, Marilyn would appreciate the merchandising.

Marilyn Monroe’s Some Like It Hot Costumes at the Academy Museum

The supplied image set documents the presentation of Marilyn Monroe’s Orry-Kelly costumes from Some Like It Hot within the Academy Museum exhibition.

Two original Orry-Kelly costumes worn by Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot are featured in Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

Seeing the costumes together restores a relationship that existed before private collecting, auctions and museum loans separated the objects from the film that made them famous.

The woman is no longer here to step back inside them. Yet the clothing still holds the evidence of her: proportions, alterations, movement and the carefully calibrated glamour of a performer who knew wardrobe could become part of the acting.

Marilyn made the dresses unforgettable. The dresses now help Los Angeles remember Marilyn as more than an image.

Watch the Feature on Marilyn Monroe’s Some Like It Hot Costumes

The supplied YouTube feature examines the surviving Orry-Kelly costumes presented for the Academy Museum’s Marilyn Monroe exhibition.

Sources: Academy Museum of Motion Pictures; Oscars.org; Los Angeles Conservancy.