What Size was Marilyn Monroe? From Roseanne Barr stating, “I’m more
sexy than Pamela Lee or whoever else they’ve got out there these days. Marilyn Monroe was a size 16. That says it all”, to Elizabeth Hurley stating,
“I’ve always thought Marilyn Monroe looked fabulous, but I’d kill myself if I was that
fat…”, you’ll often hear people saying Marilyn Monroe was around the same size as
the average American woman today (12-16). In fact, nothing could be further from the
truth, at least by today’s sizing systems. How this myth got started isn’t exactly
known. One possible contributing factor to this myth
was Marilyn Monroe’s rare extreme hour glass shape. More directly, it probably partially stems
from the fact that women’s sizes today are not at all equivalent to women’s sizes in
the 1950s. In the 1980s, in order to accommodate people’s
vanity and ever expanding girth, the U.S. Department of Commerce got rid of the uniform
sizing system and instead allowed for more ego stroking sizes. As a result of this, today, a size 8 would
have been roughly equivalent to a size 16-18 in the 1950s, obviously though this varies
a shocking amount from brand to brand. So what size was Marilyn Monroe really? Luckily, many of her dresses, carefully preserved,
are still around to measure off of. Further, one of her dress makers also chimed
in with exact measurements he took. Those measurements were 5 ft. 5.5 inches tall;
35 inch bust; 22 inch waist; and 35 inch hips, with a bra size of 36D. Her weight fluctuated a bit through her career,
usually rising in times of depression and falling back to her normal thereafter, but
her dressmaker listed her as 118 pounds and the Hollywood studios tended to list her between
115-120 lbs. As to what size Marilyn Monroe would be in
women’s sizes today, that’s not an easy thing to answer due to the differing sizes
from brand to brand, country to country, and the fact that her extreme hour glass shape
would have made it difficult for her to find the perfect size while clothes shopping. Lucky for her, she could afford to have her
clothing custom made, which she usually did. As a direct example of her size, the white
dress she wore in The Seven Year Itch was recently auctioned off and was put on a mannequin
that was a size 2, but they were still unable to zip up the dress as the mannequin was too
big. Many of her other dresses that exist from
throughout her career match up to about the same, give or take an inch or two. That being said, Marilyn Monroe at times would
have her dresses so tight they’d have to be sown onto her, so something more comfortable
in a size 4-ish (American) and something like an 8 in the U.K. is probably more accurate
with many brands. If you’re curious as to how that compares
to modern contemporary fashion models, according to BluFire Model Registry, models are generally
in the vicinity of a 34 inch bust; 24 inch waist; and 34 inch hips, which is very close
to Monroe’s measurements of 35-22-35. They also list the average model today at
5 ft. 8 inches, to Monroe’s 5 ft 5.5 inches. Elizabeth Hurley, who in the above quote called
Marilyn Monroe fat, actually has around the same dimensions: 34-24-34, though is about
5 inches taller than Monroe was. So while it’s often rightly lamented that
female models and actresses today set a standard that few can realistically live up to, the
same was true in the Marilyn Monroe era, minus Photoshop, even though she’s often used
today as an example of how things were different “back in the day”. Probably the perception of the difference
between then and now lies more in the fact that the average American is a lot bigger
today. To this point, the average American woman
in the 1950s had a 25 inch waist compared to Monroe’s 22 inches. Whereas today, the average American woman
has a waist size of 34 inches, so the gap between the models and “average” was much
less pronounced then. And, of course, today we have more advanced
means of photo and video editing to make the gap seem even larger, with the edited results
being truly unattainable, even by the models and actresses themselves. Bonus Fact:
• Another Marilyn Monroe myth was that she was a blonde. In fact, the actress famed for her platinum
blond curls actually was a dark haired brunette. She first dyed her hair blonde after being
told that models with lighter colored hair were preferable, so bleached it to golden
blonde and later adjusted this a total of nine times until she settled on platinum blonde.
