November 8th, 2022 -- by Bacchus
Marilyn Monroe’s Potato Sack Dress
You’ve heard the saying “She’d look good even if she was wearing a potato sack”, right? Yeah, that was Marilyn Monroe’s doing:
The oft-told story around this photo is that a reporter told Marilyn that she only looked so good all the time because she wore expensive dresses. This was her rebuttal. I don’t know if all this is actually true, if it was a story dreamed up by her publicist to get her onto magazine covers, or if it’s completely-spurious popular folklore.
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I think the saying is a little older than that.
“She never thinks twice about her dress,” said Jack; “she would look just as well in a potato-sack.
“Christowell, a Dartmoor tale, Volume II” by Richard Doddridge Blackmore (1882, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, Fleet Street, London)
https://archive.org/details/christowelldartm02blacuoft/page/104/mode/2up
Our British potato sacks are, of course, more stylish.
I didn’t mean to suggest the saying originated with the Marilyn anecdote! Simply that her performance of it is a noisy vector in the American popular imagination. I am pleased and delighted to see the Blackmore quote, thank you.
One thing about age is that with it comes wisdom. You never tell a woman that she looks pretty in a certain dress, what you tell her is that the dress looks very pretty on HER.
The idea is that SHE makes the dress look pretty, which is the case with Marilyn.
I have seen dresses on women on the red carpet award shows that the pretty dress just draws attention to their plain looks.
[…] garment? Allow me to introduce you to the famous burlap gunny sack dress, perhaps most famously modelled by Marilyn Monroe after someone may or may not have snarked that she’d look good even if she wore nothing but a […]