On Monday, May 2, Kim Kardashian stepped onto the red carpet at the Met Gala wearing a Jean-Louis hand-beaded dress, famously worn by Marilyn Monroe in 1962 when she sang "Happy Birthday" to John F. Kennedy.
What fans didn't know is that Kardashian had another Marilyn dress hanging in her closet, ready to be worn after the festivities the night of the Met Gala — and she revealed the dress to her fans in a heartfelt Instagram post on Friday, May 6.
According to Kardashian, the second dress, designed by Norman Norell, is the dress that Monroe wore to the Golden Globes in 1962, where she received the "Henrietta" Award for World Film Favorite.
In contrast to her Jean-Louis red carpet look, this Norman Norell dress is dark green and sequined but is as similarly form-fitting as her Jean-Louis — which Kardashian had to lose 16 pounds to wear.
Kardashian said in an Instagram post that, in her quest to find the Jean-Louis dress worn for the red carpet, she discovered that Heritage Auctions owned the Norman Norell dress. She also discovered that her friend, Jeff Leatham, artistic director of the Four Seasons hotel franchise, owned the actual Golden Globe award given to Monroe that year.
She took this as a sign.
"I saw this all as a sign the way that all of the stars aligned," she wrote in her Instagram caption.
In the pictures Kardashian shared, she posed in the dress similarly to the way Monroe did when she famously wore the dress, hitting all angles so audiences could get a full view of how the dress fit her versus how Monroe wore it. But, in the images, you can see Kardashian wears the dress slightly differently than she did.
By looking closely, you can see that Monroe didn't put her arms through the armholes, and wore it more as a halter neck — but Kardashian does put her arms through, giving the dress a new, updated look.
Chrissy Teigen even noticed this, commenting: "Wait so Marilyn didn’t put her arms through the armholes!? Iconic lol"
If the dresses weren't enough to channel her inner Marilyn, Kardashian revealed after the Met Gala that, along with the dresses, she was gifted a lock of Marilyn Monroe's famous, platinum hair.
In an Instagram video shared by Ripley’s, you can see Kardashian reacting to the museum's gift to her.
“Oh my God, I’m literally going to do some crazy voodoo s---” she said, jaw agape. “This is so special to me. Thank you so much.”
