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.