“I hate this nightgown. I hate all my nightgowns, and I hate all my underwear too.”—Audrey Hepburn as Princess Ann, Roman Holiday
The ivory lace dress Audrey Hepburn wore when she collected her Oscar for "Roman Holiday" will be auctioned on November 29 by Kerry Taylor Auctions in London. Some sources cite Givenchy as the designer; others credit Edith Head with the design Givenchy with alterations. According to Vogue UK, the iconic, full-skirted dress was adapted from a version designed by Edith Head that the actress wore in the last scene of Roman Holiday in 1952, and it has been valued at £40,000—£60,000. Hepburn, who called it her “lucky dress,” had given it to her mother, Ella van Heemstra; her mother, in turn, gave it to a friend who lived in America. The dress had been stored away in a box until the family put it up for sale. Before auctioneer Taylor could display the dress, she had to shave the mannequin to fit a 34-inch bust and a 24-inch waist.
Read more in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph.
See Roman Holiday.
Update 12.01.2011: A private collector purchased Ms. Hepburn’s “lucky” Oscar dress for £84,000.
Commercials that star dead celebrities are by definition, unseemly, but despite this, a 2006 spot for the Gap, which borrowed an Audrey Hepburn number from the movie Funny Face, was charming, especially when compared to a Dirt Devil ad that same year. (No one should have ever been allowed to manipulate the eternally graceful yet long-gone Fred Astaire into dancing with a vacuum cleaner.)
The Gap’s “Keep It Simple” spot featured Ms. Hepburn dancing in skinny pants and a turtleneck, and it made a digital transition from a jazz-filled Paris club to a plain, studio setting with a blast of ACDC’s Back in Black.
The 1957 scene amply represented simplicity and pants to a modern audience, and like the Gap, I’d also found it inspiring — not to make a debatable TV spot, but to dress and live in a less complex manner, a notion I recently revisited this notion in a blogpost for MyShape.com. (I’ve been hiding out in black garb since the 1980s.) But regardless of your stance on dead celebrities hawking products (a mini-trend that, thankfully, seems to have waned) or on black as a wardrobe aesthetic, or if you just need a good dose of joy, song and imagined-Paris in your life, I recommend Funny Face.
Slate’s sister-daughter spin-off, doubleX, has a slideshow featuring the little black dress -- Radical Roots of the Little Black Dress: From Coco Chanel to British Punk. To see it, click here.
