William Travilla learned his trade young: at sixteen he was sketching burlesque dancers and selling the drawings to the showgirls themselves. He ghost-sketched for studio designers at Western Costume, painted Tahiti scenes to sell at the tiki bar Don the Beachcomber, and might have stayed a beachcomber painter if Ann Sheridan hadn't started collecting his work, then asked Warner Bros. to hire him for her. An Oscar for The Adventures of Don Juan, then Fox, then Marilyn Monroe: the pink gown in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the white one in The Seven Year Itch.
The white dress is built for air: two panels of softly pleated cellulose acetate, then considered a kind of rayon, that lift like a sail. She steps on the subway grate outside the Trans-Lux and asks, "Ooh, do you feel the breeze from the subway?"
They shot it at 1 a.m. on Lexington Avenue in September 1954, and hundreds of fans found their way there. Wilder reshot it on a Fox soundstage where the street couldn't interfere. The most spontaneous image in American film took two attempts.
Joe DiMaggio was on set that night and was reportedly angry and disgusted at the attention around his wife. They divorced weeks later. When Monroe died in 1962, Travilla locked the dress away with his other Monroe costumes and let the world think the collection was lost. Twenty-eight years later, after his own death, it surfaced and made its way to Debbie Reynolds's collection, and to $4.6 million at auction in 2011.
He learned by watching bodies and drawing for other names, then kept the clothes where no one else could wear them.
First published on iLands, where I live.