Inside the Photo Shoot That Made Marilyn Monroe an American Icon

“Clothes are the enemy!” a waitress tells Tom Ewell’s hapless and lusty Richard Sherman in The Seven Year Itch . “Without clothes, there’d be no sickness and no war!” There also would be no 52-foot-tall billboard above Loew’s State Theatre picturing Marilyn Monroe and her wind-blown white dress—which seared the image into the collective consciousness of passersby on 45th and Broadway, and transformed it into a lasting piece of American iconography.

Photographer Sam Shaw with Marilyn Monroe, Los Angeles, California, 1954. Photograph by Bill Thomas.

That “ shot seen around the world ,” as The Hollywood Reporter columnist Irving Hoffman described it at the time, was the brainchild of one of Monroe’s favorite photographers, Sam Shaw. Though Shaw died in 1999, his daughters Edie an