Audrey Style

While waiting in the grocery store check-out line today, I picked up and flipped through Life magazine’s re-issue of a tribute to Audrey Hepburn on 20th anniversary of her death, on Jan. 22, 1993.

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I didn’t buy it, as it was rather pricey: $12.95. Instead, I came home and pulled off the shelf my copy of Audrey Style, a 1999 book by Pamela Clarke Keogh.

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If you are an Audrey fan, I highly recommend this book. It contains more than 90 black-and-white and color photos and covers a lot of territory in its 230 pages.

It spans the year of her birth in 1929 in Belgium, to the years spent back and forth between Brussels, England and the Dutch town of Arnhem, where she spent the war years. You learn about her stage and film career, her two failed marriages, her work with UNICEF and finally, her later years in Switzerland, where she died of cancer.

One great thing is learning, if you didn’t already know, that with Audrey, beauty was more than skin deep. Her generosity of spirit, her kindness and her grace and manners were what so impressed everyone who knew her.

She was and is one of the most admired and emulated women of the twentieth century. Keogh writes, “Grace Kelly had her Hermes bag and Coco the little black dress, but Audrey popularized the gamine haircut, flat ballet shoes, the turtleneck, slim capri pants, extravagant dark glasses, cinched waists, three-quarter sleeves and fitted shirts wrapped at the waist. Her personal style was so compelling that, as Cecil Beaton wrote in Vogue, ‘nobody ever looked like her before World War II…now thousands of imitations have appeared.’ “

And so it remains today.

Who can ever forget her ethereal look when she appeared at the top of Professor Higgins' stairs, ready for the ball, in My Fair Lady? 

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 Or in the outfit she wore to the horse races:

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 I think I have seen all of her films. One of my favorites is Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck. 

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Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday

Quotes from the book:

"Audrey was known for something which has disappeared, and that is elegance, grace and manners…God kissed her on the check, and there she was."

---Billy Wilder

"There is not a woman alive who does not dream of looking like Audrey Hepburn."

---Hubert De Givenchy

"She was the first to make something that’s not sexy, sexy."

---Cynthia Rowley

"One got a sense that Audrey Hepburn didn’t know how beautiful she was. There was never another movie star like her."

---Issac Mizrahi

"Audrey came to town and everyone immediately wanted to lose ten pounds, including me – and I don’t have to."

---Audrey Wilder

"The more there is, the less I want. The more man flies to the moon, the more I want to look at a tree."

---Audrey Hepburn

Are you a fan of Hepburn? Do you admire her style?