Hepburn and Givenchy, the friendship that changed fashion
PARIS: Theirs was one of the most beautiful friendships in fashion history – yet the lifelong partnership between film star Audrey Hepburn and fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy almost never happened.
The aristocratic French creator, whose death at 91 was announced on Monday, at first refused to dress the young Belgianborn actress when they met in 1953.
“When Audrey came to ask me to make her dresses for the film Sabrina, I didn’t know who she was. I thought she was Katharine Hepburn.
“Then she arrived, so graceful, young and bubbly and dressed like a young girl would be today,” Givenchy said two years ago.
“She wore cotton trousers, ballerinas and a Tshirt revealing her belly button, with a Venetian gondolier hat in her hand.”
Having only launched his own label the previous year, “I was in no position to take on such a big wardrobe for Sabrina and I told her I couldn’t dress her,” Givenchy said, adding that he did not have enough seamstresses in his studio.
But Hepburn would not take no for an answer and invited him to dinner, “which was a really surprising thing for a young wellbroughtup woman to do in those days”.
Over the course of the meal, Givenchy, who was only two years her senior, fell under her charm and ended up asking her to come to his Paris studio the next morning.
In Sabrina, Hepburn wore a Givenchy ivory ball gown with black embroidered flowers that has gone down in film history.
From then on she asked the designer to make all the clothes for her films and in 1954, she wore a Givenchy dress to accept her best actress Oscar for Roman Holiday.
“Audrey’s style came with a different silhouette, really of the moment,” Givenchy said of his muse, whom he dressed up to her death in 1993.
“His are the only clothes in which I am myself. He is far more than a couturier, he is a creator of personality,” Hepburn once said of her friend, who was at her bedside at the end of her life in Switzerland.