Marilyn Monroe's celebrity brand endures

Published: August 4, 2012 8:34 PM
By Authentic Brands Group and its partner, NECA. The company is in the midst of upgrading Monroe offerings, from trinkets to cosmetic lines, spas, salons and apparel.. From beyond the grave, Monroe tweets at nearly 55,000 followers from and has a website and official Facebook page with more than 3.3 million fans. The messages often focus on fashion, body image and other musings recorded while she was alive, as well as interacting with current celebrities who express adoration for Monroe.. The digital efforts expose a new generation to not only the actress' fashion and trivia about her life, but also promote sales of Monroe's memorabilia and the NBC drama "Smash," which follows fictional efforts to create a Broadway show based on Monroe's life.. "In some ways, she's more popular and well-known today than she was even then," said Lawrence Schiller, a photographer who knew Monroe in the final months of her life and photographed her last on-set photo shoot and author of the memoir "Marilyn & Me." Authentic Brands chief executive Jamie Salter said his company is making Monroe products more in line with the elegance of a star who famously sang "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend.". "Our aim has been to clean up the brand," Salter said, with a shift away from "souvenir-type stuff" and toward what he calls the mid-tier luxury business. Current partners include Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, MAC Cosmetics and Marilyn Monroe Cafes, a group of high-end coffee shops.. The estate also draws upon a wealth of Monroe photographs, which continue to attract admirers and customers.. "It's women that have kept Marilyn alive, not men," Schiller said.. Schiller said that whenever a gallery exhibit of Monroe photos opens, it's often teenage girls who come in the greatest numbers.. They continue to be fascinated with Monroe, but he said he's seen an evolution in the images that people are interested in.. "In the '70s the pictures that were selling were the ones that were very, very sexy," Schiller said. Since the early 2000s, he said the top sellers haven't been Monroe's nudes but rather images that accentuated her humanity.. "I think people want to see her now as a real person," Schiller said. "They want to see her in a simpler way." @marilynmonroe

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