20 Items Audrey Hepburn Loved You Can Still Buy Today | Cultured Elegance
20 Items Audrey Hepburn Loved You Can Still Buy Today | Cultured Elegance
20 things Audrey Hepern loved that you can still buy today. In 2006, the little black dress Audrey Hepern wore in breakfast at Tiffany’s sold at Christy’s London for $923,000. You will never own it. The bar of soap she washed her face with every morning cost $26. The hair mask she swore was a miracle cost 55. The perfume who Bear Dejivoni invented for her in secret.
The pearl earrings she preferred over diamonds. The tulip bulbs she once ate to survive a war. Audrey Hepburn left behind something no other style icon left behind. A shopping list. And almost all of it is still on shelves. Most fashion icons leave behind a mystery. Givveni gowns, heramo customs, things only she could afford and only she could wear. Audrey Heppern was never quite like the rest.
Her elegance was reachable. She wore the same Lacost polo in summer that you can buy at the mall today. She put Hines’s ketchup on her pasta. She ate malines for breakfast on Sundays. The most elegant woman of the 20th century kept a list of things that worked and she kept buying them. Today, 20 of those things are still in production.
Some of them are still made by the same families who made them for her. One of them was developed for her in 1954 and only released to the world after she objected to it. We’re going to walk through every one of them. The prices, the stories, and the moments she loved them. This is Audrey Hburn’s actual life item by item. Every story about Audrey begins on the same corner. Fifth Avenue, 6 in the morning, October 1960.
A taxi pulls up. A woman in a black given dress steps out, walks to the window of Tiffany and Company, and eats a pastry while staring at diamonds. It is the most photographed moment in 20th century film. And almost every piece in that frame is still for sale. The sunglasses, they are not Ray-B bands.
Despite what the internet has told you for 60 years, the originals were made by Oliver Goldsmith, a small London eyewear house founded in 1926. The exact model is called the Manhattan. And here is the strange part. Oliver Goldsmith still makes them. The reissued Manhattan is in production in the same shape, the same proportions, the same heavy black acetate frame she wore in the film. luxury eyewear pricing.
The originals from the same London house that made hers in 1961 in the same model. If that feels steep, here is the cheaper route, the Rayban Wayfairer Classic, $171 at rayband.com. These are the lookalikes. The silhouette is so close that for 60 years the world has confused the two and Rayban has never bothered to correct the record.
The pearls in the film Holly wears a stacked five strand pearl necklace borrowed from Tiffany. Offscreen Audrey was an obsessive pearl collector. She believed pearls looked warmer against skin than diamonds. She wore them daily, even when she wasn’t dressed for cameras. The Tiffany Ziggfeld collection, the modern direct descendant of that look, is still made and still sold under the Tiffany blue.
Single strand of freshwater pearls at the entry level, graduated multistrand at the top end. Either way, you are wearing the necklace Audrey actually preferred, the Givoni perfume. Here is the story almost no one tells correctly. In 1954, Hubber de Jivoni commissioned a perfumer named Francis Fabon to create a fragrance only for Audrey. Strawberries, aldahhides, iris and violet and tonka bean. He gave it to her as a gift.
She wore it alone for 3 years. In 1957 when Jivvveni decided to release it commercially, Audrey reportedly said, “Lard, I forbid you.” He named the perfume after her objection, Lintter, the Forbidden. She became the first actress in history to be the face of a perfume for a fragrance she had originally tried to keep all to herself. The reformulated 2018 version is still in production.
About $120 at Sephora, a modern reinterpretation. The bottle still says her name in invisible ink. One more before we leave the cinema. The bar of soap. Erno llo Sea Mud deep cleansing bar. $26 fromlo.com. black, charcoal, and dead sea mud, bizarre to look at, foaming white when you wet it. Audrey credited 50% of her beauty to her mother and the other 50% to Erno Llo.
She used this exact product. Lazlo opened his Manhattan clinic at 6775th Avenue in 1939. Over the next four decades, the so-called House of Silence treated Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Grace Kelly, and Audrey herself. The face Audrey shows in the Tiffany window scene was washed with this bar.
In Annie Hall, 1977, Woody Allen picks the bar up off Diane Katon’s sink and asks, “What is this? You have black soap?” her answer. It’s for my complexion. Erno Lazlo cameos in one of the most quoted scenes of the 70s and almost no one realizes it. Same brand, same bar, $26. Now leave the cinema, walk into her actual closet. Audrey Hburn offduty was a different woman. The Goni stayed on its hangers. The Tiffany stayed in the box.
Her son Shaun Hetburn Ferrer wrote about it later. Peacacoats with the collars turned up in winter. Cotton pants and lacost in summer. Square toed boots in the 70s. Ballet slippers and a long robe around the house in the morning. That was the entire wardrobe and every piece of it is still for sale. The ballet flat. Salvator Farerraamo made hers custom in Italy in every color of the spectrum.
Sky blue, maragold, emerald, coral. When Christy’s auctioned her personal effects in 2017, the flats came out by the dozen, lined up like a paint chip wheel. The Ferragamo Vara today with the gro grain she favored is still made in Italy by the same house, same factory tradition, investment piece.
She had trained as a ballerina since childhood and gone to London on scholarship to study under Marie Ramir. Ramir told her the Prima ballerina career was closed to her. She was too tall and the war had left her body too weak to ever fully recover. The dream ended in a studio in Nodding Hill in 1948. She wore the shoe anyway everyday for the rest of her life. size 10, half a size up. She wasn’t precious about it. The career was gone. The discipline stayed.
The French alternative. Repetto Sandreion. Made in France since 1956, the year before Audrey filmed Funny Face. Worth the splurge. The closest thing the contemporary market makes to what Audrey was actually wearing on the streets of Paris and Rome. The Lacost polo classic fit model L12.12 $110 at lacost.com the same shirt the brand has been making since 1933.
Audrey wore them in the south of France. She wore them in the gardens at Laaza, her farmhouse in Switzerland. She wore them with cigarette pants and ballet flats. And that was the entire outfit. No accessories, no styling, a polo shirt and trousers, and a face that did the rest of the work. She had a rule about it.
Better to be the only one in a blazer at a black tie event, she said, than the only one in black tie at a blazer event. The polo was the rule made visible. Cigarette pants. J Crews Cameron Slim Crop runs $128. Theory makes a higherend Tria version if you want to upgrade. Either gets you the silhouette she wore in Sabrina in Funny Face in every offduty photograph from 1953 to 1989. Slim, ankle cropped, cut to flatter the line of a flat shoe.
The single most consistent piece in her 36-year wardrobe history. The Ralph Lauren Oxford $125 at raluren.com. Audrey wore a lot of Ralph Lauren in her later years. Garden clothes, airport clothes, the kind of thing you wear walking the dog. Ralph Lauren made the kind of invisible American sportsear that an aging European actress wanted to disappear into. It still does.
Two more pieces from the offduty closet. Both heavyweights, both expensive. The Burberry Trench. The Kensington Heritage. Camel. Structured kneelength. Built like a small building. Four figure investment piece. The kind of coat you buy once and wear for 30 years. The most famous trench in cinema history is in the same film we opened with. The rain scene at the end of breakfast at Tiffany’s.
The alley, the cat, the kiss. That coat is a Burberry. Her personal trench, the one she wore offset, sold at the same Christiey’s auction as the ballet flats. Somewhere between8 and $10,000. Same coat, same maker. The dress at the start of the film and the coat at the end of it are both still on shelves. The Hermes silk scarf. The K90.
The original 90 cm square pure silk twill hand rolled hem. You know what Hermes costs. When I wear a silk scarf, I never feel so definitely like a woman. A beautiful woman. That was the actual quote. Notice what it isn’t. It isn’t about looking like a woman. It’s about feeling like one. The scarf was the only thing in her closet that did that work invisibly. Her favorite color was cyan, a fact her son confirmed years later.
A curet in cyan and white knotted at the neck is the most directly Audrey accessory you can buy without inheriting a private archive. This is the segment everyone wants, but nobody ever does correctly. The internet has been lying about Audrey Hepburn’s beauty routine for 30 years. coconut oil, avocado masks, olive oil rinses. Almost none of that is real. Here’s what was real.
We covered the soap earlier. Here are four more. All of them still in production. All of them documented, sourced, traceable, the hair mask, Philip Kingsley Elasticizer. $55 at phipkingsley.com. In 1974, Audrey walked into Philip Kingsley’s London clinic with hair destroyed by years of onset styling.
He was an English tririccologist, the first person to use that term professionally in the United Kingdom. They worked together from 1974 to 1980 to invent the world’s first pre-shampoo hair treatment. Audrey called it miraculous, her exact word. She had pots of it shipped to her home in Switzerland for the rest of her life. Philip Kingsley’s daughter, Annabelle, still runs the company today. The product has not been reformulated, not once.
It is the actual literal mask Audrey used. Sold at the same address, made by the same family, $55. The lipstick, Estee Lauder. She was loyal to the brand for decades. Her exact shade is lost to history. Pure color today retails around $36 at Sephora. A red shade like Envious gets you closest to what she wore in publicity photos through the60s.
The summer perfume Aqua Dearma Colonia about $130 at Sephora for the 3.4 ounce. She wore it during the filming of We Go to Monte Carlo in the early 1950s. Bergamont, naroli, orange flour, lemon, the Italian Riviera in a glass bottle. Aquade Parma was founded in Parma in 1916 and has been making the same Oda cologne for over a 100red years in the same yellow tube in the same formulation.
Audrey wore it before she was Audrey, before Roman Holiday, before Gioveni. It was already there. The perfume she never got to wear. Creed springflower. Full Creed pricing at the boutique, but available for a fraction at discounters like Jamaop and Fragrance X. Olivia Creed designed it for Audrey in the 1980s. She loved it. She wore it. Creed kept it private until after she was gone. She died in January 1993.
Springflower hit shelves in 1996, 3 years after her funeral. Of all the items on this list, this is the most tragic of the 20. A perfume made for her that the world only got to smell after she was gone. Audrey spent the last 30 years of her life at a farmhouse called La Perez in the Swiss village of Tolo Chanaz. a long gravel drive, gardens she planted herself, a kitchen where she cooked almost every night.
The last four items on this list are the ones that lived inside that house. The tulips. White tulips were her favorite flower. The connection runs deep and dark. During the Dutch famine of 1944, when Audrey was a teenager in occupied Holland, her family ate tulip bulbs to survive. Tulip bulbs and nettles and water to fill the stomach.
By the end of that winter, she weighed 88 lb and had jaundice and edema. Anemia she carried for the rest of her life. 46 years later in 1990, the Dutch flower industry developed a new white tulip and named it after her, the Audrey Hepburn cultivar. She attended the dedication ceremony at her family’s ancestral mansion in Dorne 3 years before her death. The Audrey Hepburn cultivar is hard to source commercially in the United States.
The closest substitute is Tulipa Parisma, formerly called the White Emperor. About $15 for 10 bulbs from John Sheepers or Brent and Becky’s bulbs. Plant them in October. They bloom in April. She once said that to grow a garden is to believe in tomorrow. The tulip is what she meant. The cookbook Audrey at Home: Memories of My Mother’s Kitchen by Luca Doy, her younger son.
$29 at Walmart. 35 at Barnes and Noble. 50 recipes that Audrey actually cooked. Spaghetti Al Pomodoro, the dish she could not go three days without. Penny Aliva vodka, her Hollywood comfort food. Bufa cuer. Givveni’s favorite, the one she made when he came to visit Switzerland. Moose Oshoka, the dessert she served at the White House for the Reagans. 250 unpublished family photographs.
Notes in her own handwriting. This is the closest thing that exists to a real biography of how Audrey actually lived. The Meline pan Nordic wear around $20 at Amazon or Target. The Williams Soma version is closer to 50 if you want the upgrade. Luca remembered the Sunday tray. Exactly. Toast. Quint jelly or cherry jam. Coffee with milk. A small rose from the garden in a tiny vase.
The International Herald Tribune folded on the side. and Meline’s slightly off shape, closer to American muffins than to the French original. The girl who survived the war on tulip bulbs ended it with a rose on a breakfast tray. Buy the pan. Make them on Sunday. That’s as close as you’ll get.
The ketchup. Hines. $4 at any grocery store on Earth. This is not a joke. Audrey Hepburn put Hines ketchup on her pasta. The recipe is in Audrey at home the cookbook. Penet butter extra virgin olive oil. A few squirts of hindseller cheese finished with an Italian technique called manticare. The pasta rests off the heat after the butter and oil go in. The fats emulsify. The sauce goes glossy.
The ketchup goes in last. She ate it on Sunday nights in front of the television with her son, Luca. He told the Associated Press about it years later. “We ate it when it was just the two of us,” he said. the most elegant woman of the 20th century, who turned down given gowns when they were too fussy, who refused to compromise on the cut of a coat, who attended state dinners and presidential receptions in custom couture, used Hines’s ketchup and used it like an Italian.
There is a lesson in there about elegance and about Audrey and about the strange gap between the icon and the woman. I’ll leave it for you to find. Three things almost made this list. They deserve a mention. The Breton stripe. Audrey wore St. James and Patibau stripe tops constantly through the 50s and60s. A classic St. James Meridian shirt is around $110. The Petibau Marinier 55.
Same silhouette, same stripes. The cheaper one was probably hers. The chocolate cake. The recipe lives in the cookbook. Flourless, dense, made with bittersweet chocolate and almost no sugar. Audrey ate this regularly with her best friend Connie Wald in California. If you make it once, you will understand why she did. The spaghetti al pomodoro. Same book.
Tomatoes, fresh garlic, basil, carrots, celery. That is the entire sauce. Audrey made it in batches. She served it to Gioveni. She ate it almost every day of her adult life. It’s the simplest thing on this list and probably the most accurate. Look at the list one more time. A bar of soap, a jar of hair mask, a polo shirt, a cookbook, a bottle of ketchup.
The most elegant woman of the 20th century lived inside her real life. Her elegance was reachable because she chose things that were reachable and used them everyday for 50 years until her name became a synonym for taste. That is the lesson. You can build the same thing she built. Choose the thing that works and keep choosing it. That is the entire trick. Every item in this video is linked in the description below.
sourced directly from the brand or from a trusted retailer. If something on this list spoke to you, the link is right there. Thank you everyone so much for watching Cultured Elegance. If you’d love to support the channel, you can become a channel member today by clicking join at the bottom of the screen. Thank you everyone so much for watching and I’ll see you in the next