Running your fingers over the flesh-pink dress - from its fraying hem to its souffle-light layers to the hand-stitched spine - validates a Marilyn Monroe myth. Yes, the ultimate Hollywood blonde was sewn into the skin-tight sheath in which she breathed Happy Birthday Mr President to John F. Kennedy at a crowded Madison Square Garden party in 1962. But no, Monroe did not wear nothing but Chanel No 5 in bed.
Among her personal effects that will go on the block at Christie's New York on October 27th is a chaste white night-dress, embroidered with an "M" for Marilyn - a symbol of the innocent, child-like quality of the seductive superstar.
How poignant and potent mere clothes can be. Even laid flat - without the voluptuous body whose vital 34-22-34 statistics Monroe said should be engraved on her tombstone - her wardrobe tells her story. Here is the beaded siren dress in which Monroe, gilded high-heeled sandals snaking round her toes, drove wild 100,000 American soldiers massed on a freezing Korean hillside in 1954.
Just a few weeks before, she had married the baseball legend Joe DiMaggio and she kept to the end his devotion, friendship and the platinum wedding ring with 35 Princess-cut diamonds that he had slipped on her finger. That, too, will be in the auction.
Symbolically, the sober black wool dress in which Monroe announced her engagement to Arthur Miller is the only outfit to have fallen apart, devoured by moths or, like the marriage, just not built to last.
The Mexican cardigan that Monroe pulled down over fleshy thighs as she posed on Santa Monica beach for George Barris in the summer of 1962 seems like a cuddly fashion comfort blanket, with its pilled surface and woolly threads. Like everything that Monroe owned, it was packed up, stains and all, when she died in August 1962. There were the jeans creased at knees and crotch; the worn and scuffed cowboy boots from The Misfits; the line-up of high-heeled Ferragamo stilettos bearing the sweaty outline of her (size seven-and-a-half) feet, and a patterned purse, from her favourite designer Emilio Pucci, with visible finger marks and traces of lipstick.
The effects (willed to Lee and Paula Strasberg of the Actor's Studio, who were surrogate parents to Monroe) were laid in white, coffin-shaped boxes and buried in a New York storage depot for 37 years.
Their value is inestimable. But Christie's has had a go, suggesting that the Happy Birth- day Mr President dress by the designer Jean Louis, with its 6,000 hand-sewn beads, might fetch $250,000, breaking the record set by the gown in which Diana, Princess of Wales, danced with John Travolta. The Mexican cardigan is estimated at $20,000-$30,000; and at least $4,000 is suggested for the scarlet rhinestone stilettos from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which Monroe and Jane Russell sang We're Just Two Girls From Little Rock.
"It's a time capsule of a Hollywood life," says Nancy Valentino, Christie's vice-president for marketing. "In 10 years I have seen only three or four Marilyn pieces and this collection has stayed completely intact."
Its value is not just as movie and personal memorabilia (including Monroe's white piano, and gold television). The collection is significant, too, for the light it sheds on a 20th-century American icon.
Meredith Etherington-Smith, a Christie's director and curator of the sure-fire best-seller catalogue, draws attention to the library from Monroe's home in Brentwood in Los Angeles. Works by Hemingway, Joyce and Tolstoy, and a signed edition of Kerouac's beat generation On the Road prove that Monroe was no mere dumb blonde. The star was also media-savvy and image-aware long before fashion and celebrity went hand in designer glove, says Etherington-Smith, who calls the collection a "visual biography".
There were at least two Marilyns: the star that the Herald Tribune in 1953 described as "the baby-face blonde, whose eyes open for diamonds and close for kisses"; and the vulnerable child-woman, who faced off photographers in a girlish, full-skirted sun-dress when she came out of a hospital after losing the baby she was expecting with Miller.
The obverse of the glam dresses dripping with beads is the innocent holiday attire, like a Mexican straw hat or an azure-blue cotton playsuit with matching skirt and Capri pants. Christie's has edited out the mawkish elements. There is no underwear, except garter belts and bustiers used as film costumes; lipsticks are included only if unused. Yet the time-capsule objects still have an eerie, unsettling quality. In a compact lies a crumbling residue of face powder; a stray blond hair clings to a feathered hat; and in a frame, a handkerchief embroidered with "M" is stained yellow with - who knows? - champagne or tears.
Marilyn Monroe's effects go on display in Buenos Aires (July 13th and 14th), New York (July 24th-August 11th), Los Angeles (August 20th-24th), London (September 19th-22nd) and Paris (October 4th)