Director Billy Wilder never had imagined that by writing a specific scene in a script for his “The Seven Year Itch” a particular white flying skirt, a groundbreaking actress and a delicious breeze will make a history.

Even those who have not seen the film know the image of Monroe in the white dress standing above a subway grating blowing the dress up since it’s one of the most iconic photographs in movie history.

In the film, the white dress appears in the sequence in which Marilyn Monroe and co-star Tom Ewell exit the Trans-Lux 52nd Street Theatre, then located at 586 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, having just watched the 1954 horror film Creature from the Black Lagoon. When they hear a subway train passing below the grate in the sidewalk, Monroe’s character steps onto the grate saying “Ooo, do you feel the breeze from the subway?”, as the wind blows the dress up exposing her legs. But what happened behind shooting this, is what made the scene way more popular than the movie.

Originally the scene had been scheduled to be shoot on the street outside the Trans-Lux at 1:00 am on 15 September 1954. The presence of the blonde bombshell and the movie cameras caught the curiosity of hundreds of fans. So, what was supposed to be a regular shooting of a movie scene had turned to be a media spectacle. However, as fun, as it sounds, it was impossible to shoot the scene with 5,000 onlookers, who whistled and cheered through take after take as she repeatedly missed her lines.

The image of Monroe smiling and having a “light battle” with her flying skirt was fun for everyone except of the embarrassed and angry Joe DiMaggio, Monroe’s husband at that time. Is said that DiMaggio “hated” the dress, and allegedly this incident played a role in their divorce.

It took around three hours and 14 takes to shoot the scene, but anyway, the footage material was useless cause of the noise of the crowd, so Bily Wider was forced to re-shoot the moment on a set at 20th Century Fox.The iconic full-length image of Monroe standing with her dress being blown up never actually appears in the film. The shot used in the film is only of her legs, cut with reaction shots, and never shown full-length.

After Monroe’s death in 1962, the costume designer William Travilla kept the dress locked up with many of the costumes he had made over the years for the actress, to the point that for years there was talk of a “Lost Collection”. Only after his own death in 1990, were the clothes put on display by Bill Sarris, a colleague of Travilla. It joined the private collection of Hollywood memorabilia owned by Debbie Reynolds at the Hollywood Motion Picture Museum. During an interview with Oprah Winfrey, speaking of the Monroe dress, Reynolds stated that “[the dress] has become ecru because as you know it is very very old now.” In 2011, however, Reynolds announced that she would sell the entire collection at an auction, to be held in stages, the first on 18 June 2011. Before the auction, it was estimated that the dress would sell for a price between $1 and 2 million, but it actually sold for more than $5.6 million ($4.6 million plus a $1 million commission).