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Sydney Sweeney can do it all.
In addition to being a versatile actress, she can pull off daring red carpet looks and can evoke Hollywood’s glamorous past.
Her latest red carpet look is channeling a 70-year-old iconic look by none other than Marilyn Monroe.
The results are simply jaw-dropping.
Sydney Sweeney is a versatile red carpet icon
On Monday, December 15, Sydney Sweeney walked the red carpet at TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles.
This was for the premiere of The Housemaid, a film in which she stars alongside Amanda Seyfried.
Sweeney is always eye-catching. She has demonstrated a phenomenal taste for fashion (and made stellar choices in who dresses her for events).
This week, the 28-year-old actress wore a white halter-neck dress by Galia Lahav.
As you can see, the plunging neckline over the cinched bodice makes for a dramatic form that the sweeping skirt only extends. This is beyond an hourglass shape. This is something more.
She’s serving Marilyn Monroe realness
In 1955, Marilyn Monroe wore one of her most iconic looks of all time in The Seven Year Itch.
The film presents a man overcome with a desire to cheat on his wife after he meets her character, who is both beautiful yet clueless.
Most people have seen some photo of Monroe’s memorable scene in which she stands on a vent, which — seemingly without her awareness — causes her dress to rise, driving the film’s protagonist to distraction.
(If you haven’t seen a photo, you’ve seen an homage to it)
In channeling this look with such a similar dress and her own blonde hair, Sweeney is stirring memories of Hollywood’s golden age.
This year has had serious ups and downs for her
Sydney Sweeney stars in The Housemaid. If you’ve been counting up Sweeney’s projects, you know that 2025 has been an extremely busy year for her, professionally.
That both explains and makes it a bad time for her to have been so deeply mired in controversy.
It seems very likely that people close to the actress advised her to not weigh in. Sometimes, this is good advice — let people say what they want, then the dust settles, and you get to move on.
But in 2025, that didn’t work for someone as hyper-visible as Sweeney.
As she remained silent, it allowed people to speak for her — conjuring up terrible narratives that define her in many people’s eyes.
This was a PR mistake that may have cost her some fans for good
Truth be told, Sweeney probably said more to debunk plastic surgery rumors this year than she did to quash claims that she’s a Trump-loving white nationalist.
There was never any actual evidence of that — but most of us would pretty eagerly want to shut down that rumor. It’s likely that Sweeney thought that she was taking the high road.
It was only after months that Sweeney realized that this false narrative wasn’t going away. She announced in December that she is “against hate.”
She even elaborated to People: “I don’t support the views some people chose to connect to the campaign. Many have assigned motives and labels to me that just aren’t true.”
For some, it was too little, too late. For others, however, it was her trying to correct a PR mistake — the sort of error that someone in their 20s might make when they’re suddenly one of the most talked about actors on the planet.
It’s difficult to not spoil ‘The Handmaid’ while talking about this
Oddly enough, people believing twisted and sinister things about Sydney Sweeney has some thematic links to The Handmaid.
We shouldn’t say too much without spoiling, but suffice it to say that there is a level of suspicion between her character and Amanda Seyfried’s. It’s a major plot point, and it plays into the film’s twist.
Seyfriend is more experienced with fame, being a decade and some change older. Perhaps one blonde Millennial actress has learned from the other during this press tour.
As people know, Seyfried is an outspoken good person and only doubles down on telling the truth in the face of backlash.
There is a cost to this inspirational behavior. But it’s always better than letting internet strangers make up who you are.
Sydney Sweeney Radiates Golden Age Hollywood Glamor in Spectacular Marilyn Monroe Dress was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.