"Williams may have become a star as a blonde teen siren on Dawson’s Creek, but since then, despite plenty of on-screen nudity and some graphic scenes, she has studiously avoided trading on her sex appeal. She cites a story that Monroe used to tell about walking down the beach in a bikini as a teenager and suddenly feeling the whole world open up to her. “Any messages that I got as a child about what it is to have a woman’s body or to be sexual were all negative—that people wouldn’t take you seriously or that they would take advantage of you,” she says. “So I couldn’t relate to that at all.” But surely she took some vicarious pleasure slipping into Jill Taylor’s lush period costumes? “The expectation to be beautiful always makes me feel ugly because I feel like I can’t live up to it,” she says. “But I do remember one moment of being all suited up as Marilyn and walking from my dressing room onto the soundstage practicing my wiggle. There were three or four men gathered around a truck, and I remember seeing that they were watching me come and feeling that they were watching me go—and for the very first time I glimpsed some idea of the pleasure I could take in that kind of attention; not their pleasure but my pleasure. And I thought, Oh, maybe Marilyn felt that when she walked down the beach."
— Michelle Williams on playing Marilyn Monroe in Vogue US
theportable:
On Tour With Gardens and Villa
I hung out with these guys on Saturday, interviewed them in a noodle shop on the lower east side, went to their show then got supz drunk with them afterwards. Then ate heaps of garlic sausage and cut all my hair off.
- Camera: Canon EOS REBEL T3
- Aperture: f/4.5
- Exposure: 1/60th
- Focal Length: 30mm
theportable:
The HONORable Fifties
Portable goes backstage at HONOR’s Spring 2012 show to interview designer Giovanna Randall.
Remember that time when I excused myself to Malin Ackerman and she said, “go right ahead” and I brushed past Rose McGowan? She killed Liz, she killed the teen dream. Deal with it.