Crafting the ideal

“If you really want to get upset go out and see her next number,” Dorothy (Jane Russell) tells Lorelei Lee’s (Marilyn Monroe) grovelling former fiancé in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). The two showgirls are in France, the star attractions of a glitzy nightclub performance. After being warned off Lorelei, her ex-fiancé shows up to win her back. Lorelei isn’t having it. She lets him know exactly what he’s missing out on when she twirls into focus, swatting the chorus line of suitors with a fan as they offer her their hearts, declaring, “No!”

It’s the first line of Monroe’s iconic performance of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’, where she commands the stage in a floor-length pink satin gown. While Lorelei is portrayed as a diamond-digger, the song’s lyrics have a feminist quality that’s hard to deny. Romance, she croons, “won’t pay the rental on your humble flat” and “men grow cold, as girls grow old”. What doesn’t lose their shape, as she says women do, are diamonds. If men are “louses” who go back to “their spouses” once women “lose [their] charms”, why shouldn’t they at least have some kind of financial security?

In the 1950s, women were often forced to rely on men, who had far more job opportunities and earning power. Women were expected to get married, raise kids and take care of the home, devoting themselves to their husbands and patriarchal ideals of the perfect housewife. ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ offers an alternative where women don’t have to rely on men to provide for them – they can use their own beauty and charm to attract wealth. The phrase ‘diamonds are a girl’s best friend’ has since been used to express independence and self-reliance.

It’s not just the words though. The iconic performance and scene-stealing outfit has become a pop cultural phenomenon, remixed and reinterpreted by countless stars across the decades to challenge expectations of femininity. In the ‘Material Girl’ music video, Madonna performs the same gestures as Monroe, grasping her heart while suitors offer their hearts. By transforming herself into the blonde bombshell, Madonna satirises the scene to show that women in the 1980s didn’t need men or their money. They can get their own. Experience has made Madonna rich; now all the boys are after her. “Yeah, he’s still after me,” she tells a friend over the phone, “he just gave me a necklace. I think it’s real diamonds. He thinks he can impress me by giving me expensive gifts.” She rejects her would-be lover’s gifts and the patriarchal values that prioritise material possessions over love and real connection. In the end, she accepts a drooping bouquet of flowers and drives off with her lover in a second-hand car.

Framing the music video as a film being produced on a Hollywood backlot further strengthens the connection to Monroe’s silver screen legacy, but also exposes the construction of a feminine ideal. Though Monroe certainly contributed to her image, 20th Century Fox also controlled how the world perceived her. The parts they provided helped establish her blonde bombshell persona, particularly in their musical comedies like Some Like It Hot (1959). In the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes scene, Monroe was meant to wear a risqué showgirl outfit – until nude photos of her were sold to Playboy. They feared a backlash and wanted to protect her image, so covered her up in the now-famous pink gown.

A year later, frustrated by her pay and the quality of roles she was being offered, Monroe went on strike. She was scheduled to play another bombshell in another musical but was refused the right to read the script and discovered that her male co-star would earn 70% more than her. Instead of giving in to the studio’s demand that she return to work, Monroe courted the mainstream media by honeymooning with a famous baseballer and entertaining troops in Korea. The front-page news made her a superstar, which she used to renegotiate her contract and weaken the studio’s control over her. This defiant act contributed to the downfall of the studio system and gave future stars more creative (and personal) freedom.

One of those future stars is Kylie Jenner, who not only exhibits Monroe’s business-savvy but has carefully crafted her own image on social media and reality TV, a stark contrast to the Hollywood Golden era stars fashioned by the studio system. Still, the iconography of the pink gown and Monroe’s fabled magnetism is powerful. Jenner recreated the scene for a digital cover of V Magazine, demonstrating how today’s stars have tried to emulate Monroe’s legendary allure and position themselves alongside her in the pop cultural pantheon.

Yet by adopting the ideal that Monroe represented, stars inadvertently uphold beauty standards popularised in the 1950s, which apart from being ‘respectable’ were overwhelmingly White. In the 100th episode of Gossip Girl, Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) performs ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in a dream sequence that inadvertently shows how dated and unimaginative that 1950s notion of beauty was: a beautiful blonde White woman dreams only of being another beautiful blonde White woman. By 2019, America’s Next Top Model contestant Winnie Harlow donned the pink and channelled Monroe in an Instagram post that went viral. By dressing as Monroe for Halloween, the model and reality TV star – who has a unique skin condition that causes loss of pigmentation – used her platform to challenge dominant White beauty standards that still hold Monroe as the ideal and project an image that better reflects our diverse society.

A year later, ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ was remixed in another music video to further shatter that White cultural dominance. Megan Thee Stallion and Normani’s “Diamonds” centres two Black women and celebrates their strength and sisterhood. There are no suitors vying for Normani’s affection as she descends a stage in a risqué adaptation of Monroe’s famous pink gown. While previous interpretations of the ‘Diamonds’ scene featured men fluttering their fingers in women’s faces, trying to get their attention, the same visual is reimagined with women in “Diamonds”. In this instance, they’re framed as a supportive chorus who champion Normani’s ownership of her body and money (“my pear shape all-dripped up, it’s freezing in my bag”), and reinforces Megan Thee Stallion’s line “date night with my bitches, getting real twisted”, a lyric that dismisses men far more forcibly than either Monroe or Madonna. Men are faceless henchmen in “Diamonds” and women are antiheroes taking a baseball bat to the patriarchy and antiquated ideals of beauty.

The girl-gang gaiety is apparent in Birds of Prey (2020), which featured “Diamonds” on the soundtrack. The Gentlemen Prefer Blondes connection begins in the female-fronted superhero film, which Margot Robbie devised, produced and starred in. While being interrogated in one scene, Harley Quinn (Robbie) is knocked into a daze, drifting in and out of a candy-coloured fantasy where her hyper-colour pigtails are transformed into platinum trusses a la Monroe. Harley launches into ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ but transforms Monroe’s demure dance and gestures into an anarchic revelry. When those shuddering fingers appear in Robbie’s version, she takes a bite out of the chorus line. It’s an unruly reimagining of Marilyn Monroe’s famous musical number that trades the red backdrop for vibrant pink and sees Robbie strut the stage in a satin jumpsuit and jewelled choker, taking a stand and reclaiming pink as a feminist symbol.

Though marketed as an emblem of hyper-femininity and female fragility since the 1950s, pink is now worn by stars, protestors and politicians to symbolise women’s ownership of their sexual, reproductive and social rights. While Monroe’s satin eveningwear represented post-WWII respectability, Robbie’s jumpsuit disrupts the blonde bombshell archetype – including her own. Once pigeonholed as “the hottest blonde ever”, Robbie has fought to reshape how she was perceived. The reclamation of the colour also honours the pink sea seen at the global 2017 Women’s March and evokes the pink pantsuits worn by celebrities to drive voter attendance in 2020.

Across the world, pink has unified protests for women’s rights and become the colour of rebellion. Wearing a sequined pink dress dress and swilling cosmopolitans with Hollywood glamour style, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara actor Elaine Crombie embodies the sex-positive and body-positivity movements in Kiki and Kitty (2017). The comedy series follows the adventures of Kiki (Nakkiah Lui), a young Black woman whose talking fairy-god vagina Kitty (Crombie) coaches her to be more confident. Not only does Kitty help Kiki reach her dreams in the ice-skating rink, in episode four she also helps her reach orgasm. Crombie’s bold and vivacious character celebrates the sensuality, agency and humour of First Peoples women. This appropriation of pink and reading of Monroe’s idealised femininity challenges the myth of a singular screen goddess and shows that beauty and sexuality come in many guises.

By honouring ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’, celebrities and stars hope to capture Monroe’s mythic femininity, but in the years since Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, they’ve fought for, and gained, the autonomy and agency to craft their own ideal and project new visions of womanhood.

Discover more with links to films and extra content

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
20th Century Fox, 1953

Material Girl
Limelight Productions, 1985

Birds of Prey
Warner Bros., 2020

Diamonds
Atlantic Recording Corporation, 2020

Winnie Harlow “Marilyn Monroe” Halloween edit
Mr James, 2019

Gossip Girl
S5, E13 (2012)
17th Street Productions, 2007–2012

Kylie Jenner transforms herself into Marilyn
V Magazine, 2019

Kiki and Kitty
S1, E4
Porchlight Films, 2017