glamour

In the decades following her death, Marilyn Monroe has been exalted as the human embodiment of bygone Hollywood glamour and unmatched sex appeal but recently, she has been given another accolade: the counterweight to our culture’s ever-thinner beauty ideal. The oft-invoked argument centers around the declaration that Monroe was a size 8/10/12/14 and if she were alive today, she would be considered overweight and probably, never would have been a star. (These claims are inherently problematic because women’s apparel sizing has varied considerably over the years, rendering numbers utterly useless as indications of proportion and because such conjectures are speculative and sensational in nature.) Continue reading →