Dressing Marilyn
The ACH Group are working with the incredible charity CENTREPOINT to bring awareness of homeless young people giving them a safe place to live, and support them into education or a job. Not only will you be helping to change young lives, but you'll also help us create a society without youth homelessness.
The book, tour and untold stories will be the backdrop of charitable events to bring awarness to homelessness and raise much needed money for the charity
The Beginning and the Tour
It’s September 2007 early evening and I am talking with a dear friend whom I’d lost contact with many years before... “Who would have thought that this man and this random reconnection would turn my world around:
After Travilla passed away in 1990, the archives of their business and the incredible collection appeared to have no future, and Travilla’s legacy all but forgotten. Most people were only interested in Travilla’s famous muse, Marilyn Monroe. With Travilla deceased and Sarris suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, the most important thing to Sarris was to somehow get Travilla the recognition as the genius he really was. I pledged to do everything in my power to make that so.
I was suddenly thrust into a world of glamour, sophistication and drama all surrounding a man named William Travilla.
My initial findings were that Travilla’s claim to fame was dressing one of the world’s leading icons, however this is such a small part of his contribution to the world of fashion and design.
As I began to dig deeper into the collection, I learned that he’d dressed approximately 270 stars, designed for more than one hundred movies and Television series, and had a career that culminated in him winning an Oscar and two Emmys.
I promised Bill Sarris that I would make this Tour a celebration of Travilla’s life and also help with this tragic illness. A portion of the proceeds from each exhibition will be donated to a local Alzheimer’s Association.
Bill Sarris’s words to me were “my last wish or last memory is for you to make Travilla the household name he always should be, you have my love and support in anything you do”.
Heartfelt and beautiful. He also wrote in the visitor’s book “one in heaven and one still here”.
So this really is a true Hollywood story from a man who knew them all and a man no longer with us but left us a gem in his diaries and taped interviews. Everything in the book is real and true with inserts’ from people who actually knew the people mentioned.
Telling the story of Travilla’s life and his many celebrity friends through the collection will bring these people back to life and show how so many years after their deaths the passion for them is still there and in some cases bigger.
The Book
After the successful tour in Bath, Carlton Books came to me with an offer I could not refuse
