Because her hands had held them, they had been transformed into relics.
One hundred years after her birth, Marilyn Monroe remains a figure whose ordinary possessions carry extraordinary weight. An auction of 185 personal items — purses, cosmetics, photographs, undergarments — opened to thousands of bids within hours, timed to her June 1st centennial. What the sale reveals is less about commerce than about the human need to remain close to those who have captured our collective imagination, even decades after they are gone.
- Bids surged into the thousands within hours of opening, with a single 1950s evening purse — still holding cigarettes, dimes, and a lipstick — already approaching its $100,000 estimate before the auction closed.
- A yellowed brassiere estimated at $1,000 drew fifteen bids and climbed to $7,000, signaling that even the most intimate and mundane remnants of Monroe's life carry outsized cultural charge.
- Julien's Auctions and Heritage Auctions together offered items spanning Monroe's honeymoon, her final Brentwood home, and never-before-seen photographs hidden for decades, intensifying the sense of rare access.
- Across the country, the centennial sparked parallel celebrations — a thousand fans in Palm Springs recreating her subway-grate dress, and younger generations on TikTok reverse-engineering her exact makeup techniques.
- The auction's trajectory suggests that sixty-four years after her death, Monroe's hold on American culture shows no sign of loosening — the bids kept rising, and the arithmetic kept measuring a life that refuses to recede.
On the centennial of Marilyn Monroe's birth, an auction house opened what felt less like a sale and more like a pilgrimage. One hundred eighty-five items from Monroe's life went under the hammer, timed to June 1st, 1926 — the day she was born — and within hours the bids had climbed into the thousands.
The centerpiece was a gold-toned cylindrical evening purse from the 1950s. Inside: a tiny comb, a lipstick, eight cigarettes, a handful of 1940s dimes. Estimated at $100,000, it had already reached $70,000 by Thursday morning. Alongside it were an evening gown, lip pomade, and photographs — many never publicly shown — signed by the photographers who had shaped her image.
Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, rose from foster homes to become one of Hollywood's defining stars before her death in 1962 at thirty-six. Yet sixty-four years later, a 1950s brassiere inherited by her acting coach Paula Strasberg — estimated at $1,000 — drew fifteen bids and reached $7,000. The wooden gates to her Brentwood home, purchased for roughly $100 in her lifetime, attracted offers of $15,000.
The sale was part of a broader centennial moment. In Palm Springs, more than a thousand people dressed in replicas of her white-pleated subway-grate dress. On TikTok, younger generations studied her makeup techniques, trying to recreate the precise line of her eyeliner — a detail the auction house noted when listing her personal cosmetics.
There was something almost archaeological about the whole affair. The objects themselves were ordinary — the things anyone might carry or wear — but because Monroe's hands had held them, they had become relics. The auction was never really about the items. It was about the stubborn fact that a woman dead for nearly seven decades still holds the attention of Americans in a way few people ever do.
On the centennial of Marilyn Monroe's birth, an auction house opened its doors to a peculiar kind of pilgrimage. One hundred eighty-five items from Monroe's life and the collections of those close to her went under the hammer, and within hours the bids had climbed into the thousands. The sale began on Thursday, timed to mark June 1st, 1926—the day she was born—and it revealed something about how we hold onto the lives of the famous: not through grand gestures, but through the small, intimate things they touched.
The centerpiece was a cylindrical evening purse from the 1950s, gold-toned and compact, the kind a woman might carry to a nightclub. Inside it sat the detritus of a life—a tiny comb, a tube of lipstick, eight cigarettes, a handful of dimes from the 1940s. The auction house estimated it would fetch around $100,000. By Thursday morning, bidders had already pushed it to $70,000, and the number was still climbing. But the purse was only the beginning. There was an evening gown. There was lip pomade. There were photographs, many of them never before shown publicly, signed by the photographers who had captured her image—Allan Grant, Milton Greene, and others whose names are footnotes to her legend.
Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, had grown up in foster homes and was discovered by an army photographer while working in an aircraft factory during the Second World War. She became a star in the 1950s, a sex symbol whose face sold tickets to films like Some Like It Hot and Niagara. She died in 1962 at thirty-six, from an overdose. That was sixty-four years ago. Yet here, in 2026, people were bidding serious money for her brassiere—a 1950s undergarment that had yellowed with age, inherited by her acting coach Paula Strasberg. The estimate was $1,000. It received fifteen bids, with the highest reaching $7,000.
The auction was organized by Julien's Auctions, and they had been careful to note that these were items Monroe had personally owned, touched, and used—many from her last residence in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. The company emphasized the photographs and slides, describing them as "countless never-before-seen" images that had been "hidden for decades." There was also a separate auction from Heritage Auctions that included a Christian Dior skirt Monroe had worn on her honeymoon and a letter from her husband, the playwright Arthur Miller.
The sale was part of a larger cultural moment. Across the country that week, exhibitions and celebrations marked Monroe's centennial. In Palm Springs, California, more than a thousand people dressed in replicas of her most famous costume—the white-pleated dress from the subway grate scene—and posed next to a statue of her wearing the same outfit. On social media, particularly TikTok, younger people were studying her makeup techniques, trying to recreate the exact shade of her lipstick, the precise line of her eyeliner. The auction house had included several of Monroe's personal cosmetics in the sale, noting the social media interest in her look.
There was something almost archaeological about it all. The olive-green painted wooden gates to the only home Monroe had ever owned in Brentwood went to auction. She had paid around $100 for them in 1962. Bidders offered $15,000. A purse that once held cigarettes and spare change became a vessel for collective memory. The items themselves were ordinary—the things anyone might carry or wear—but because they had belonged to her, because her hands had held them, they had been transformed into relics. The auction was not really about the objects. It was about the fact that Monroe, dead for nearly seven decades, still held the attention of Americans in a way few people ever do. The bids kept coming, and the total kept climbing, and somewhere in that arithmetic was the measure of a life that had never quite stopped mattering.
Citas Notables
Countless never-before-seen photographs and slides of the star as well as rare and hard-to-find images hidden for decades— Julien's Auctions, describing the sale's photographic collection
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why do you think people bid so much money for something like a sixty-year-old brassiere?
Because it's not really about the garment. It's about proximity to her. When you own something she wore, you own a kind of contact with her, even if it's only imaginary. The brassiere had been with her, against her skin. That's a form of intimacy that photographs can't quite offer.
But she's been dead since 1962. Why hasn't the fascination faded?
Because she became a symbol before she became a person, and symbols don't age the way people do. She was frozen at thirty-six, at the height of her power and mystery. There's no decline to watch, no aging, no falling out of fashion. She's perpetually at her peak.
The auction included makeup products. Why would anyone want to use her old lipstick?
They don't want to use it. They want to look at it, to know exactly what shade she wore, what brand she preferred. And then they want to buy the same thing new and wear it themselves. It's a way of becoming her, or at least of inhabiting her aesthetic. That's why TikTok is full of people recreating her look.
What does it say about us that we're willing to spend thousands on her personal items?
It says we're still searching for meaning in the lives of the famous. We think if we can own the objects, we can own some part of the story. But really, we're just trying to understand what made her matter so much, and we're hoping the answer is hidden in a purse or a photograph.
Do you think Monroe herself would have been surprised by this auction?
I think she'd understand it perfectly. She spent her whole life understanding how to be looked at, how to be desired. This auction is just the final form of that—people still looking, still wanting, still unable to look away.