Star’s possessions feel the ‘Hepburn’ at auction

A Burberry trench coat once owned by Audrey Hepburn will go to auction in September at Christie’s London with an estimated sale price of $7,683 to $10,244.

At the Real Real, an online consignment site, the asking price for a similar used women’s Burberry trench coat is currently $645. Christie’s, then, is guessing that its coat’s association with Hepburn gives it a $7,000 to $10,000 premium.

“It’s a very difficult question to answer,” said Adrian Hume-Sayer, Christie’s director of private collections. “How do you put a price on provenance?”

It’s one that Hume-Sayer and his team are grappling with.

“What we’re selling, really,” said Hume-Sayer, “is the connection to the individual.”

Art and collectibles don’t have a use value. Yet the art market — capricious, opaque and confusing as it might be — has managed to establish a comparatively static series of prices: Anyone with a Picasso can expect to sell it for a minimum (and maximum) dollar amount.

Those expectations are dashed, though, when it comes to objects with celebrity provenance. A ring owned by Nancy Reagan was “worth” about $8,000, but sold for $319,500 at Christie’s New York. Across the Atlantic, a gray purse once owned by Margaret Thatcher that looked thrift-store ready (high estimate: $2,272) sold for an astonishing $24,635 — or about $10,000 more than a new Birkin bag from Hermès.

Similarly, the sheen of an Audrey Hepburn provenance has already proven wildly lucrative. In 2006, the little black Givenchy dress she wore for the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (left) sold for $590,000 (its high estimate was $90,000). Five years later, in 2011, the “Ascot” dress Hepburn wore in “My Fair Lady,” estimated at $300,000, sold for $3.7 million.

There is an empirical basis, in other words, for applying what you could call a “Hepburn premium” to her belongings.