You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who grasped the power of an image, especially the printed image, as early as Marilyn Monroe. More than six decades after her death, her carefully fashioned image remains immediately recognizable. Her look has been endlessly reproduced and reinterpreted across every form of art and culture. From Bugs Bunny to, more recently, Kim Kardashian, who wore her iconic crystal-studded sheer dress to the 2022 Met Gala, which is still grabbing headlines today.
Closer to home, on September 27th, Fort Works Art and Wild Silks will examine that legacy with personal style with The Marilyn Effect, billed as an evening of fashion, art, and community engagement, presented within Fort Works Art’s current exhibition of photographs of Monroe by Lawrence Schiller.
Schiller took photographs of Monroe in the last years of her life, documenting the actress at a time when Hollywood fame, her sexuality, and fashion collided with a mass media that was becoming increasingly powerful and closely linked. The Marilyn Effect uses those photographs as a starting point for considering how clothing and image convey identity.
“Fort Works Art has always been interested in what happens when disciplines collide,” says Lauren Saba, founder of Fort Works Art and Gallery of Dreams. “This isn’t about turning the gallery into a traditional runway for one night. It’s about putting fashion inside a larger cultural conversation and the way we use that to tell the world who we are.”
The evening brings together looks from Forty Five Ten and M.L. Leddy’s, styling by Wild Silks and a preview of Collected by Christi, alongside contributions from designers, retailers and cultural partners from across Fort Worth and Dallas.
As for guests, attendees will help create what appears on the runway. Threads of Us, an interactive fashion work developed for the evening, begins while attendees arrive. Each guest will select a Wild Silks scarf through a color-analysis experience. During cocktail hour, those individual pieces will be incorporated into a skirt displayed in the gallery before disappearing backstage. By the end of the evening, the work will return as the final runway look, transformed into a garment built from the room’s collective choices.
“The idea behind Threads of Us is that everyone walks into a room with an individual point of view, but together those choices can become something entirely new,” says Christi Braswell of Wild Silks. “Marilyn understood better than almost anyone how clothing and image can become a form of communication.”
The collective effort raises some of the evening’s main questions, such as how much personal style belongs to the individual and how much is shaped by the people and culture around them.
The evening will also support two local nonprofit efforts, with proceeds from ticket sales benefiting Gallery of Dreams, Fort Works Art’s nonprofit arm dedicated to accessible contemporary arts programming and opportunities for artists and the community. Proceeds from the evening’s auction will benefit Saving Hope Animal Rescue.
Alongside the runway presentation and Threads of Us, guests can view the Lawrence Schiller exhibition, shop participating designers, and enjoy cocktails or champagne and light bites through the night.
Monroe’s image has endured because each generation has found something new to project onto it. We’ve found new ways to emulate or honor her. Though not the original Blonde Bombshell, that mantle belongs to Jean Harlow, Norma Jeane Mortenson, and American culture is almost inextricably linked with one another. At Fort Works Art, The Marilyn Effect considers what happens when that image is brought back into the room, surrounded by people making images of themselves.
The Marilyn Effect takes place Sept. 27 from 6–9 p.m. at Fort Works Art, 2100 Montgomery Street in Fort Worth.