Trousers and tiaras: Audrey Hepburn, a woman's star
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71 trousers and tiaras: Audrey
Hepburn, a woman’s star Rachel Moseley
abstract Audrey Hepburn is one of cinema’s most stylish and enduring icons, and has embodied an ideal of femininity for generations of women. Using textual analysis, archival research and audience accounts of ‘Doing the Hepburn Look’, I argue that Audrey Hepburn, as a star clearly addressing a female audience, offered a flexible image which was enabling to young women through dress in relation to exigencies of gender, class and national identity. The paper draws on research conducted as part of a larger project investigating Hepburn’s ongoing appeal for young British women from the 1950s to the 1990s.
keywords audience; Audrey Hepburn; class; differences; dress; femininity
feminist review 71 2002 c 2002 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/02 $15 www.feminist-review.com (37–51)
37
On how to be lovely, you gotta be happy y Can’t do it with make up, you’ve just gotta wake up, You don’t need dough, you don’t need a college degree You’ll be as happy as can be y
From McRobbie’s (1978) cultural studies work on the oppositional use of make up and fashion by working-class girls, to the recent emphasis in film studies on the relationship between cinema, consumption and the female spectator (see for instance Doane, 1987 and Stacey, 1994), critical work emerging in the later stages of second-wave feminism has shown a marked attention to the consideration and re-evaluation of fashion and femininity. This work has frequently been a site in which the exclusions of second-wave feminism in relation to race, ethnicity, sexuality, class and culture have been significantly challenged (See Gaines and Herzog, 1990; Ash and Wilson, 1992; Bruzzi, 1998; Bruzzi and Church-Gibson, 2000; Guy and Banim, 2000). Published in 1990, Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (Gaines and Herzog) signalled the importance of a critical approach to clothes and the body as part of a wider concern to deconstruct the female image, and in Chic Thrills (Ash and Wilson, 1992), Angela Partington’s ‘Popular fashion and working-class affluence’ argued for the importance of class in understanding the ways in which fashion is used by women in the everyday practices through which they present themselves to the world. As Wilson (1985: 13) has convincingly argued in relation to the significance of dress, ‘The political subordination of women is an inappropriate point of departure if, as I believe, the most important thing about fashion is not that it oppresses women’. As the lyrics of ‘On How to be Lovely’ from Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1956) suggest, at the heart of the star text ‘Audrey Hepburn’, lie a set of democratic discourses of fashion and beauty and a clear address to a female audience, producing a highly flexible star image which consequently has been available to women across boundaries of generation, class and national identity. Penny Summerfield has suggested that
[p]ersonal narratives draw on the generalised subject available in discourse to construct the particular personal subje
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