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.
