Finn Morse
At the premiere of the 21st Academy Awards in 1949, a new prize strutted onto the scene: Best Costume Design. The award created a new precedent for higher effort and overtly glamorous costumes in Hollywood. Grandmother to film costuming, 35-time nominee Edith Head, dominated the scene with flowing feminine dresses and brought mainstream appeal to the genre form. One of Head’s main collaborators was the doll-faced Audrey Hepburn, an upcoming star turned renowned film actress. Going forward to collaborating on a hot streak of films, Hepburn and Head rose to great success in the early 1950s.
With this golden precedent for costume design set by Hepburn and Head’s partnerships, an expectation for innovation was almost inevitable. For Head, going back to her usual noir and genre fare was the ideal. But for Hepburn, the time for invention, evolution, and artistic expression was only beginning. Audrey Hepburn formed a lifelong friendship with costume designer Hubert de Givenchy after initially meeting the actress during Sabrina and Funny Face. Funny Face saw Hepburn’s ultimate turning point, prompting for less overtly elegant costuming and more practical timely outfits. Givenchy’s style lent Hepburn’s model to evolve with each costume collaboration, blossoming from royal cocoon to practical tights. Her slender physique was emphasized more and more, and Hubert de Givenchy quickly became Hepburn’s portal into the fashion stratosphere. Said physique is emphasized in the studio’s promotional material for Funny Face:
Later, Hepburn’s bouncy and tomboyish personality broke further into the limelight, reflecting on her roles. After the turn of a Head-dominated decade in the 50s, Hepburn’s most famous costumes came with 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In an effort to break away from the historically flowery costume designs of the prior decade, the pair indirectly created the “skinny girl” fashion epidemic. The film follows quirky-cute Holly Golightly (Hepburn) and her citywide escapades, bonding with her neighbor Paul (George Peppard). Throughout their friendship, Holly shows Paul her freedom-centric lifestyle in light attention-seeking vignettes in the big city. Hepburn’s iconic role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s created a cornerstone for the manic pixie dream girl trope, in equal parts making the world fall in love with Holly Golightly for her moments of genuine emotion—and especially for her fashion sense.
Hepburn’s slender looks, bold style, and overtly original personality appealed to audiences everywhere. The acclaim garnered Hepburn her third Oscar nomination and helped reshape a mainstream feminine ideal. In a piece on Hepburn’s fashion influence in the 1950s and 1960s, Sine McEllin of Ian Drummond Vintage writes, “She often wore comfortable clothing when she wasn’t on red carpets, and the simplicity of an all-black ensemble with a duffle coat looked just as natural on her as the luxurious runway gowns. She helped popularize plain black leggings after wearing a pair in [Funny Face].” In efforts to capitalize on Hepburn’s personal brand of fashion, the character Holly Golightly married practicality with glamor. As Golightly window-dresses at the title jewelry store, Hepburn herself becomes window dressing for the American public. A closer look at this very first costume identifies several visual landmarks that would come to define modern fashion.
From the “little black dress,” or LBD, to her leopard print sunglasses, to a vertical beehive hairstyle. The “LBD” represented a confident departure from Hepburn’s previous works of elegance and regality, seen in Roman Holiday and Sabrina. This gave the actress and her fanbase an aligned identity in the dress, rather than division between fashion cultures. In a piece on the little black dress legacy, Daphne Zhu on Lara writes, “Holly embodied independence, sophistication, and mystery—and women saw the dress as an accessible means to channel her allure. Holly was a free-spirited New York socialite, often seen in glamorous attire and exuding an air of mystery. The dress became a way for women to glimpse into that feeling, even if their lives didn’t always resemble Holly’s.” The model and dress would respectively become the mainstream for American fashion for the next 60 years. The original dress sold at auction in Winter 2006 for £467,200.
In tandem with her dress, Golightly’s combined leopard glasses and vertical haircut give her an almost regal physique. Sine McEllin writes further, “Her distinctive look was said to be an alternative feminine ideal at the time, in comparison to the curvaceous sex appeal of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Her demure femininity and short hair offered something different for petite young women to look up to.” Emblematic of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s world-famous fashion style, Breakfast at Tiffany’s costumes embrace the shifting demographics of the 1960s. With the Kennedys labeled “Camelot” for near-royal reverence, the American public looked at her clothes as the stuff of queens. Hubert de Givenchy, the sole costume designer for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, put homages to Kennedy like a Burberry trenchcoat in the film.
The shiny tiara nested on Holly’s head evidences this Kennedyfication further, implying that Holly Golightly is not just an everyday woman, but a queen. She is a royal who finds satisfaction staring at unaffordable jewels, a princess who eats her fill of croissants. Drinking champagne in the morning, serving her nameless cat milk from a cocktail glass, taking $50 for the powder room, an audacious portrait of fictional feminism was created that needed its very own term for reference.
Commenting on Audrey Hepburn’s journey to fashion stardom, Cheyenne Nierhaus for Aoide Magazine remarks how, “Her romantic allure only grew as she continued to accept roles in romantic films, starring alongside Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, and other handsome and popular actors. In many of her main roles, she embodies what is now called the “manic pixie dream girl” trope.” This personality has been debated for years, with either adherence or departure from feminist culture.
Some would argue that exercising third-wave feminism philosophies further limits women within the patriarchy. Others suggest that freedom of autonomy aids women in finding identity and self-actualization. Either way, the result is feigning reality for the sake of the male gaze. Holly Golightly is perhaps the finest early example of the aforementioned “manic pixie dream girl” archetype. Holly’s personality is debated within the film itself as being “phony.” Her self-proclaimed benefactor, O.J. Berman (Martin Balsam), even remarks, “She’s a phony, but she’s a real phony.”
A parade of evidence in favor of Holly’s originality comes during her early open-door apartment party. The party surrounds Holly Golightly with equally wacky characters, emphasizing Holly’s authenticity by contrasting her lifestyle to the true ‘phonies.” By only observing the party, a voyeur like Paul can spy cracks in this ultra-vibrant neon wall. Details like a fake eyepatch and enthusiastic reactions to a cat make Holly the only truly interesting guest. These aren’t Holly’s friends; they’re actors attending this twisted Gatsbyesque party attempting to find kinship with Holly’s true eccentricity. Again, she’s a phony, but she’s a real phony.
Her endless quirks and idiosyncrasies appeal to that observational male-insert Paul, a deliberately blank slate next to a peculiar showstopper. Paul’s fascination with Holly’s personality circumstantially leads him to find details hitherto unobserved about Holly. Paul is at first set apart from the ‘rats’ and ‘superrats’ in Holly Golightly’s life for his lack of advances and genuine astonishment at Holly’s personality rather than a drive to restrict her.
The closer the pair grows to one another, the more evidence of unavoidable attraction iss uncovered. There are visual details like Paul’s resemblance to Holly’s warbound brother, Paul’s golden telephone next to Holly’s dysfunctional landline, and their dual animal masks. But it’s within a handful of individual scenes that Breakfast at Tiffany’s justifies itself as an emotional tale of finding true romance and belonging in an absentminded world.
Underneath the coats and dresses of personality, Holly Golightly hides her origins as a way to escape her traumatic past in the American Southwest. When no one is seemingly looking, Holly plays the guitar and dresses in casual clothes, singing to herself the fabled “Moon River.” The song and its leitmotif tie the film together musically. They imply that Holly’s mysterious desires were really in the reflection in front of her, and not the diamonds behind the display case. The only one watching was Paul, whom Holly greeted with a gentle hello.
While the remainder of Breakfast at Tiffany’s reverts into a classic Hollywood love story ending, the impact of Holly’s personality in its first half is impossible to ignore. In the end, Holly metaphorically hangs up her boots and buries her dresses to be with Paul, the only non-rat in the otherwise infested New York City. Often construed as a betrayal of third-wave feminism by appealing to the happy ending Paul wanted, studying the film closely reveals that Holly Golightly always wanted a simple nuclear living style. She lacked a respective empath she needed to comfort her. The impact of her self-actualizing persona, seen in the costumes, did not go unseen, evidenced by the LBD craze that persists into 2026. The costumes still elevate and empower. And while not a perfect film in its entirety—no thanks to the reckless yellowface of Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi—Breakfast at Tiffany’s is without a doubt a classic of its time. Its fire is in no small part to the iconic personality that is Holly Golightly, one of the immortal film characters, and her soon-to-become iconic allure.
NOTE: a slight tweak with the final words to emphasize (and land on) your thesis idea.
