From ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ to ‘The Seven Year Itch,’ How ‘Blonde’ Costume Designer Recreated Marilyn Monroe’s Most Iconic Looks
“At the eleventh hour, a tailor from Western Costume figured it out,” says Johnson, who also designed period looks for “I, Tonya.”
The pleating was created by pressing fabric over folded cardboard molds. “You make a mold, and you heat it in a little closet, and no one does that anymore,” Johnson explains.
When it came to re-creating the quintessential “flying skirt” moment when Monroe steps over a subway grate, Johnson says, there was “a whole mathematical layout of the amount of fabric to get that arc beautiful and right.”