When Audrey Hepburn died in January 1993, fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson published a personal testimony to Hepburn’s impact on the 1950s: ‘For me, growing up in those years, she offered hope from the moment I saw her portrait in Vogue.’ Hepburn’s look, an androgynous body frequently dressed in the haute couture of leading Parisian designer Hubert de Givenchy, departed dramatically from the then dominant ideal of buxom femininity, and thus encourage girls like the young Elizabeth Wilson to develop different, more stylish and idiosyncratic self-images: ‘She demonstrated that there was, after all, another way to be.’

            Wilson links the impact of Hepburn’s stylish difference to wider shifts in American and European culture: the rise of young-oriented designer fashion and the spirit of rebellion which captured increasing numbers of young people. In Wilson’s view, Hepburn’s 1950 films ‘protest against the stuffiness and cultural conservatism of their times’ and thus mark ‘the beginning of the youth rebellion.’ However, the films’ endings also raised the spectre of conventional maturity, which transformed free-spirited firls into dutiful wives and homemakers, a fate shared by many of Hepburn’s female fans, who were, according to Wilson, ‘a talented generation of young women, most of whom abandoned careers for the American suburban dream.’ Yet, precisely because of such unhappy engines, an abstracted and timeless vision of the young Audrey Hepburn, ‘poised forever at her moment of momentous choice’, in Wilson’s words, has retained its power until the present day. Wilson describes the appeal of this vision as follows:

For me her charm lay … in a style that seemed the embodiment of sophisticated, existentialist Europe as opposed to the overripe artificiality of Hollywood. She might look like Bambi, but her casual style signaled student, not starlet; she proved that a woman could have brains and still be attractive.

This ‘proof’ is at the very centre of Funny Face (Donen, 1957), Audrey Hepburn’s fourth Hollywood film and her first musical. The title song defines Hepburn as ‘a cutie with more than beauty.’ (keep reading)