Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation: Kim Kardashian x Marilyn Monroe

ABSTRACT

After May 2, 2022, heritage conservation briefly became a hot topic in the world of celebrity gossip. That evening, Kim Kardashian, a reality TV star and entrepreneur, wore a 60-year-old dress that had belonged to Marilyn Monroe to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Costume Institute Gala. In wearing Monroe’s dress, Kardashian sought to channel the glamor and celebrity of the mid-century star. She also summoned the ire of museum professionals, who considered her choice to wear a fragile historical garment a flagrant violation of conservation ethics. Yet increasingly, the discipline of conservation has come to recognize that an object’s ‘integrity’ does not rest solely in its physical materials – and the emerging discourse of performance conservation, informed by research into the conservation of contemporary art as well as intangible cultural heritage, emphasizes the active lives of what I call ‘performative objects’ over their physical form and static appearance. Here, I posit that Kardashian’s wearing of Monroe’s dress may be understood as a form of conservation – perhaps not of the dress itself, but of the performance of which that dress was an integral part, and without which, I argue, the dress has little significance. To make this argument, I will also draw on innovative approaches to the conservation of Indigenous heritage that recognize the preservation value of reanimating objects from the past. Establishing Monroe’s dress as a ‘performative object,’ an item inextricably linked to the body in motion, I endeavor to show how performance itself preserves the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Fashion conservation
• performance conservation
• indigenous conservation

Acknowledgements

This article resulted from research undertaken within the Swiss National Science Foundation project ‘Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge,’ which is based at the Institute of Materiality in Arts and Culture at Bern Academy of the Arts, Bern University of Applied Sciences. For their support, comments, and ideas I would like to thank my colleagues in that project, Hanna Hölling (project lead), Emilie Magnin, and Valerian Maly. I am additionally grateful to Sarah Scaturro, Puawai Cairns, and Hannes Bajohr for their generous assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The owner of Monroe’s dress, Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, claims that it incurred no damage. Apparently damning photographs of loose rhinestones and pulled seams taken by ChadMichael Morrisette and posted online by Scott Fortner caused a frenzy on social media, though Ripley’s asserts that the photographs only depict previously sustained stresses to the delicate fabric. Yet damage may well be invisible, and the practical realities of garment conservation make it extremely likely. My argument proceeds on the assumption that the dress’s physical integrity was indeed impaired.

2 ‘Costume,’ ‘fashion,’ and ‘dress’ are often used interchangeably when referring to the study or conservation of clothing and its history. I use ‘fashion’ and ‘dress’ in this manner, reserving ‘costume’ for those special instances of theatrical, cinematic, or similar costume. The ‘Happy Birthday’ dress at the center of this article is a special instance, representing both a performance costume and an instance of designer fashion.

3 The so-called ‘Hays Code’ limited how much skin actors could show onscreen.

4 Looking back, Jean Louis apparently recalled the use of sequins, but only rhinestones were used. Gary Vitacco-Robles reports this statement slightly differently; in his telling, Jean Louis called it ‘the nudist dress’ (Vitacco-Robles 2014, 427).

5 This footage can be found on YouTube.

6 The AAM specifies that ‘If a museum engages in the practice of loaning objects from the collection to organizations other than museums, such a practice should be considered for its appropriateness to the museum’s mission; be thoughtfully managed with the utmost care and in compliance with the most prudent practices in collections stewardship, ensuring that loaned objects receive the level of care, documentation and control at least equal to that given to the objects that remain on the premises; and be governed by clearly defined and approved institutional policies and procedures, including a collections management policy and code of ethics.’ Many – though not all – collection care specialists would consider Ripley’s loan to Kardashian to violate these standards. See ‘Loaning Collections to Non-Museum Entities,’ American Alliance of Museums, https://www.aam-us.org/programs/ethics-standards-and-professional-practices/loaning-collections-to-non-museum-entities/.

7 Conversation with Sarah Scaturro, 26 September 2022.

8 Healy’s discussion of ‘immateriality’ is limited almost entirely to notions of the virtual museum – i.e., how material objects may be studied and encountered in simulation through digital interfaces.

9 This lineage begins with John Searle, Austin’s primary interpreter, and continues with Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, the last of whose approach has perhaps been most influential. Interestingly, as Loxley points out, Butler grounds her earliest writing on gender performance in the ideas of Victor Turner and other theorists who approach performance through anthropology, a lineage that is not evident in Gender Trouble (1990) and later works (Butler 1988; Loxley 2007, 141).

10 Mieke Bal calls attention to the ways in which ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ are sometimes kept apart, though they are interdependent. Bal briefly describes performance most simply as ‘the execution of an action; something accomplished; a deed, feat,’ whereas a performative is an ‘expression that serves to effect a transaction or that constitutes the perfor­mance of the specified act by virtue of its utterance’ (Bal 2002, 174; Bal 2021; Kollnitz and Pecorari 2022; Parker and Sedgwick 1995).

11 Translation mine. ‘Oft wirkt die Monroe wie ein strahlender Körper, dessen weißes Gesicht nahtlos übergeht in die platinblonden Haare und dessen helle Haut mit den enganliegenden Kleidungsstücken derart verschmilzt, daß man keine Körpergrenzen, sondern vielmehr eine einzige Körperbewegung wahrzunehmen meint.’

12 Kardashian may not be an actor, but she is certainly a performer – and the constant public criticism of her own transformations of her body strike me as not dissimilar to criticism of performance artists like Marina Abramović or Orlan, whose bodies are their medium.

13 Kim Kardashian quoted in The Kardashians, season two, episode seven, 2022.

14 Abramović sees her reperformance practice as a preservation technique. Her major reperformance projects include Seven Easy Pieces (2005) at the Guggenheim Museum and the retrospective The Artist is Present (2010) at The Museum of Modern Art.

15 ‘Reenactment’ and ‘reperformance’ are often used interchangeably in performance writing. I prefer to distinguish the potential open-endedness of ‘reperformance’ from the precise reconstruction often demanded by ‘reenactment.’ See my forthcoming essay on simulation (Pelta Feldman forthcoming).

16 Kardashian was surprised to find that many of her young fans had not previously heard of Monroe (The Today Show, 21 June 2022).

17 Conversation with Sarah Scaturro, 26 September 2022.

18 Puawai Cairns, Twitter thread, 12 May 2022, https://twitter.com/PuawaiCairns/status/1524528643787354112.

19 ICOM Costume, Twitter thread, 17 May 2022, https://twitter.com/icomcostume/status/1526346263926558720.

20 Conversation with Puawai Cairns, 9 November 2022.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.