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.