If at first you don’t succeed, get your mom on the phone to get you a second chance.
That power play appears to have been Kim Kardashian’s plan for getting into the vintage dress that Marilyn Monroe wore in 1962 when she publicly serenaded President Kennedy 10 days before his 45th birthday.
“I flew all the way to Florida to try on the Marilyn dress at Ripley’s. They were not going to let me wear this dress. They weren’t even going to let me try it on until Kris Jenner calls,” Kardashian said in a confessional on this week’s episode of Hulu’s “The Kardashians,” explaining that — as seen on the show the week prior — her first shot at getting the dress up had been a big fail.
“I was like please, Mom, if you make this happen, I’ll marry you. I would have done anything.”
Jenner, also speaking in a confessional on the show, didn’t seem fazed by the challenge.
“I cannot tell you my secrets,” Jenner said, “but if someone says no, you know what I say: ‘You’re talking to the wrong person.’”
“I was there and I was, like, screaming at her on the phone,” Kardashian said, “going, ‘I’ll pay for it … I’ll fly to Florida, I’ll do an appearance at Ripley’s … and she’s just like, ‘Shut up, shut up.’ She kept muting them and going, ‘Shut up.’”
And Ripley’s said yes. Kardashian got one more chance to squeeze into the famous, fragile Norman Norell dress, which actually had to be sewn on Monroe that night in ’62.
She told Allure in August that she went on a three-week crash diet between fittings, cutting out all carbs and sugar until she weighed 16 pounds less before the second fitting attempt. The diet, which included meat instead of her typical plant-based fare, also set off her psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis and sent her to her rheumatologist after the gala. But we digress.
“They’ve agreed to let me try on the dress one last time, and if it fits, I’m going to the Met,” she said to camera. “If it doesn’t fit, I’m not going to the Met.”
And we all know how the story ends — but still.
“I have been working my ass off to see my vision come to life. I will be crushed if this doesn’t pay off,” Kardashian explained.
As she stood there in her Skims shapewear (natch!), with two gloved dressers at her feet waiting to maneuver the gown up and over, she was “so nervous,” she said.
Cue hairstylist pal Chris Appleton, who provided the literal hand or two at the moment of truth. Kardashian couldn’t shimmy into the gown like she would with any other less-fragile piece of clothing, she said, so Appleton “lifted up my butt in my Skims, repositioned my shapewear, and then it [the dress] went up.”
Kardashian got Mama Jenner on the phone right away to tell her that the Marilyn dress was on her body.
“Kinda fits,” the mogul told her momager. “Kind of. I mean, the back doesn’t zip, my butt doesn’t fit, but it goes up.” (Kardashian wound up tying the back closed on Met night and draping a fur to cover up the evidence. Then she changed out of the dress and into a replica immediately after her red carpet arrival.)
“Kimberly, shut the f— up that you got in that,” Jenner exclaimed on the other end of the line.
“I got in it. I got in it!” Kardashian replied.
Jenner cooed, “I’m so proud of you.”
Kardashian would later be accused of damaging the dress — something that Ripley’s ultimately denied. The entertainment company ultimately waded into the fiery discourse to “say with confidence” that Kardashian’s evening out “did not cause damage” to the famous outfit.
One person who did get damaged in this final edit of the Ripley’s affair? Ex-boyfriend Pete Davidson, who attended the 2022 Met Gala with Kardashian on his arm, was reduced to voice-over anonymity in the scene from “The Kardashians” following their midsummer breakup.
“That’s the dress,” he says meekly from off camera. Guess he just didn’t fit.