The exhibit's publicity poster hung on the wall of its facade.
Located at the end of Via de Tournabuoni in Piazza di Santa Trinita, the curved building houses the museum, as well as the Ferregamo boutique. Upon entering I went down a flight of stairs and entered another world. The closest thing I could equate to this museum's vibe is the vibe of the I Love Lucy museum in Universal Studios (Orlando, Florida)...but it's better than that. The lighting is dark, the carpet gray, and the walls have spotlights shooting up them. Unfortunately pictures were not allowed, but I will do my best to convey to you my two hour museum experience.
After paying the five euro entry fee at the desk, I was met by a hanging screen with a video of Marilyn Monroe stumbling/dancing around a tree playing on it. Upon reading, I found that the clip was from The Misfits. Surrounding this screen were printed quotes on a table, as well as two informational posters. Both contained quotes from Ferragamo about Miss Monroe, as well as quotes by the screen siren herself.
The combination of the black and white video and the quotes was made all the more powerful (and slightly creepy) by the various pieces of music floating through the air. In the distance you could here the soft whispers of Marilyn's singing voice, closer by you could hear the music of the roaring twenties (coming from a video screen showing the history of Ferragamo shoes), and coming from another direction was a kind of eery haunted classical piece.
I'm going to save the deets on the shoe portion of the museum (a very small one-roomed/hallwayed section) for my fashion blog, but I will say that the main Ferragamo "works" that you see there are shoes. Because, well quite frankly, that's what he's known for.
I'm pretty sure that I ended up seeing the exhibit in the reverse order of how it's supposed to be viewed. I guess I was just too entranced by the bodiless voice singing "I wanna be loved by you, just you, and nobody else but you..." coming from the room to my left. So, I left the shoes and entered heaven.
To my right, there were vintage scripts. The sight of Some Like It Hot with handwritten notes on the script cover brought tears to my old-movie-loving eyes. It was also interesting to note how titles changed. "Let's Make Love" was originally "The Billionaire." "The Prince and the Showgirl"? "The Sleeping Prince."
Plush seating in the center allowed one to sit and look at the video screen playing montages of clips from her various films. The soundtrack included "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "Bye Bye Baby," "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend," "I'm Through With Love," and "Do It Again." The clips included everything from Some Like It Hot, to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, to The Misfits, but the most heartbreaking moments were the scenes from her last film (which she got fired from on the day after her birthday). The movie in question is "Something's Got To Give" and her most famous scene/stunt from it was skinny dipping and then proceeding to put a rob on after hopping out of the pool.
To the left and right of this magical screen were a series of platforms on which stood dress forms containing some of her most famous outfits from the silver screen. The pink dress from the Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend sequence? There. The black almost flapper-style dress from Some Like It Hot? There. The white halter dress? The fashion/costume design addict in me could barely handle the magic.
At the foot of these displays were glittery publicity photos scattered around the ground, as well as shoes for the outfits in plexiglass cases. Many a pair were marked as coming from the workshop of Salvatore Ferragamo. Coincidence? I think not.
Once I left the magnificent singing room of costume magic, I entered a large room dedicated to photographs of Marilyn. One of the goals of the exhibit was to compare her photographs and body with greek mythology. One particularly poignant demonstration of this involved a video screen that slowly faded Botticelli's Birth of Venus into a photograph of Marilyn at the beach. Along one wall were a series of photos of Marilyn in her spare time in chronological order. Still other walls contained framed magazine covers of the starlet from both Italy and the United States.
Finally, there were two rooms that also had a striking tale to tell. The first was dedicated to Marilyn's notorious rendition of "Happy Birthday" that she sung to her dear "Mr. President." One television monitor played the song in a loop. Next to the screen was a replica of the dress she wore. On the wall behind that, there was a sketch of the dress she was supposed to wear as the designer thought the one she ultimately chose was too revealing and wanted to ban her from wearing it. Labels also invited the viewer to ponder her cause of death and whether or not it was linked to the Kennedys. To round things out, the exhibit pulled together two Andy Warhol pictures. The first was a silk screened black and silver Marilyn. The second: a blue Jackie.
Yet, the most haunting image in my mind was still to come. In 1962, just six weeks before her death, Vogue commissioned Bert Stern to do a photo shoot with Ms. Monroe. This photo shoot would ultimately be called The Last Sitting and was published in a book by Stern twenty years after it took place. Some of my own favorite images of Marilyn come from this series in particular. But the museum exhibit took things one step further. Instead of just showing the photographs, they recreated the white room, bed, and white sheets where the shoot would have taken place and put them silently behind a window.
This in combination with the small photograph of the room where Marilyn was found dead (much starker than my imagination had led me to believe for all of these years) left me with a feeling I could not quite shake. So I chose to sit around and wait for the clips from Some Like it Hot and Marilyn's enchanting voice singing "I Want to Be Loved By You" before I left.
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