“She was a fantastic photo subject,” says Truhler. “She started her career as a swimsuit model so she had learnt her angles and was used to being in front of the camera. She would literally sit in front of the mirror for hours to figure out how to move. It didn’t just fall into place.” Marilyn demonstrated a masterclass in posing that would blow modern-day Instagram starlets out of the water.

“When she tilts her head back and looks down, it’s amazing. Apparently she used to do that because she thought her face was too long,” Sam says. “Her bone structure was epic,” reasons Nic. Although let’s not forget she tinkered with her facial proportions until they were perfect for the lens. “She had a chin implant,” confirms Kennedy. “And they corrected her two front teeth. It’s likely she had a nose job, too. Everyone had surgery in Hollywood, even then.”

It’s tempting to imagine how Marilyn would have navigated the world of social media and the selfie were she alive today. “If you think about it, she was the originator of the naked selfie with all those images of her draped in a white sheet. She knew how to play with the camera. Kim Kardashian does that today, but in a much more manipulated way, it’s not with a sense of fun,” says Graham. “Marilyn would have been the queen of Instagram selfies today. She’d know the angle from which to take it and the filter to put on it.” And in many ways, Truhler says, Monroe was a beauty influencer long before the term was ever coined. Marilyn remains – in an age of photo-mania – one of the most photographed women in the world, with new, unseen photographs being unearthed all the time, which only adds to her longevity.

“She was just an exquisite beauty,” reflects Sam. “Not a threatening beauty, there was a really lovely, breathless, childlike quality to her. And that vulnerability – people are drawn to it because they wanted to look after her.” And yet she was the ultimate contradiction. Behind that ostensible fragility lay a marketing genius, a woman who knew how to manipulate her image to seduce the entire world. She was the ultimate architect of her own beauty. Hers wasn’t a perfectly geometrical face, but she possessed an acute knowledge of how to work it. “I’ve been invited to places to sort of brighten up the dinner table,” Marilyn said of her beauty in an interview shortly before she died. “It’s sort of like being a musician, you’re invited so you’ll play the piano.” And I’d put money on the fact that Marilyn will be playing it long after we’ve all passed on to the other side, too.

The ultimate trendsetter: Stylist and Pixiwoo retrace the steps of Marilyn Monroe