As the auctioneers at Christie’s prepare to gavel down the final price on a sequined gown once worn by Marilyn Monroe, I find myself contemplating the peculiar spectacle of British collectors bidding thousands for the raiments of a dead starlet. It is a scene that could have been lifted from Edward Gibbon’s account of Roman decadence, or perhaps from the pages of a Victorian penny dreadful about the worship of pagan idols. We live in an age that has lost its sense of historical proportion, and this auction is but one more symptom of our cultural decay.
Monroe herself was a creature of the celluloid age, a manufactured goddess whose life was a tragedy of exploitation and loneliness. Yet we persist in treating her wardrobe as holy relics, as though her lace gloves and satin heels could somehow transmit the glamour of a bygone era. It is a form of necromancy, a desperate attempt to conjure meaning from the ashes of a celebrity culture that has consumed itself. The British collectors, with their stiff upper lips and private incomes, are among the worst offenders. They snatch up these artifacts with the same rapacity with which their grandparents once collected Egyptian mummies or Maori heads.
This obsession with Monroe’s garments is particularly galling when one considers the state of the nation. We have crumbling schools, a health service in crisis, and a political class that seems incapable of addressing the long-term decline of our country. Yet here we are, devoting column inches and fortunes to the ephemera of a woman who died sixty years ago. It is as though we have decided that the future is too frightening to contemplate, so we must instead retreat into a fantasy of the past, a past where the biggest problem was whether Norma Jeane would wear white or red to the premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
There is a deeper pathology at work here: the death of historical consciousness. We no longer understand that the past is a foreign country; we insist on colonising it with our own sentimentalities. Every generation reimagines Monroe in its own image: for the baby boomers, she was a symbol of liberation; for millennials, a pitiable victim of misogyny; for the collectors who will bid tonight, she is an investment, a hedge against inflation. But none of these Monroes are real. The real Marilyn was a woman who struggled with addiction, who faced the leering gaze of a male-dominated industry, and who died alone in a bungalow in Brentwood. That is the uncomfortable truth that the auction will allow us to ignore.
And what of the gowns themselves? They are mere fabric, stitched by anonymous hands, worn for the benefit of camera lenses. To attribute to them any intrinsic value is to fall prey to the same fetishism that Marx identified in the commodity. We are worshipping the commodity form in its most literal sense: the dress as object, as symbol, as investment vehicle. It would be laughable if it were not so deeply sad.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of this auction is the timing. It coincides with the centenary of Monroe’s birth, a milestone that might have prompted genuine reflection on the nature of fame, the treatment of women, or the soul of American culture. Instead, we have a fire sale. It is as though we have decided that the only way to honour the dead is to dismantle their legacy and sell it to the highest bidder. The Victorians at least had the decency to memorialise their dead with statues and parks. We have eBay and Sotheby’s.
I write this as a man who has spent his life in the company of books, who believes that culture is something to be lived and transmitted through the generations, not auctioned off to speculators. The Monroe auction is a spectacle of decay, a carnival of the grotesque, and a mirror to our own declining civilisation. But I suspect I will be in the minority. The bidders will bid, the gavel will fall, and the gown will be placed in a climate-controlled cabinet in some Mayfair townhouse. And we will all pretend that this is a normal, healthy way for a society to conduct its affairs.
It is not. It is the sound of a culture eating its own entrails.
