20 Items Audrey Hepburn Loved You Can Still Buy Today Cultured Elegance

20 Things Audrey Hepburn Loved That You Can Still Buy Today In 2006, the little black dress Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany's sold at Christie'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 Hubert de Givenchy 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. Givenchy gowns. Origamo customs. Things only she could afford and only she could wear. Audrey Hepburn was never quite like the rest. Her elegance was reachable. She wore the same Lacoste polo and summer that you can buy at the mall today. She put Heinz ketchup on her pasta. She ate Madeline's 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 Hepburn's actual life, item by item. Every story about Audrey begins on the same corner. 5th Avenue, 6 in the morning. October 1960. A taxi pulls up. A woman in a black Givenchy 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-Bans, 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 Ray-Ban Wayfarer Classic. $171 at rayban.com. These are the lookalikes. The silhouette is so close that for 60 years, the world has confused the two, and Ray-Ban has never bothered to correct the record. The pearls. In the film, Holly wears a stacked five-strand pearl necklace borrowed from Tiffany. Off-screen, 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 Ziegfeld 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 multi-strand at the top end. Either way, you are wearing the necklace Audrey actually preferred. The Givenchy perfume. Here is the story almost no one tells correctly. In 1954, Hubert de Givenchy commissioned a perfumer named Francis Fabrand to create a fragrance only for Audrey. Strawberries, aldehydes, iris and violet, and tonka bean. He gave it to her as a gift. She wore it alone for three years. In 1957, when Givenchy decided to release it commercially, Audrey reportedly said, L'interdit, I forbid you. He named the perfume after her objection. L'interdit, 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 Laszlo. Sea Mud. Deep Cleansing Bar. $26 from ErnoLaszlo.com. 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 Laszlo. She used this exact product. Erno Laszlo opened his Manhattan clinic at 677 Fifth 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 Keaton's sink and asks, What is this? You have black soap? Her answer, It's for my complexion. Erno Laszlo 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 Hepburn off-duty was a different woman. The Givenchy stayed on its hangers. The Tiffany stayed in the box. Her son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, wrote about it later. Pea coats with the collars turned up in winter. Cotton pants and Lacoste's 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. Every piece of it is still for sale. The ballet flat. Salvatore Ferragamo made hers custom in Italy in every color of the spectrum. Sky blue. Marigold. Emerald. Coral. When Christie'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 grosgrain 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 Rambert. Rambert 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 Notting Hill in 1948. She wore the shoe anyway, every day, 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. Rapetto Cendrillon. 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 Lacoste Polo. Classic fit. Model L.12.12. $110 at lacoste.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 La Paisible, 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.Crew's Cameron Slim Crop runs $128. Theory makes a higher-end trica version if you want to upgrade. Either gets you the silhouette she wore in Sabrina, in Funny Face, in every off-duty 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 ralphlauren.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 sportswear that an aging European actress wanted to disappear into. It still does. Two more pieces from the off-duty closet. Both heavyweights. Both expensive. The Burberry Trench. The Kensington Heritage. Camel. Structured. Knee-length. 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 off-set, sold at the same Christie's auction as the Ballet Flats. Somewhere between $8,000 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 Carré 90. The original 90-centimeter 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 Carré 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 philipkingsley.com In 1974, Audrey walked into Philip Kingsley's London clinic with hair destroyed by years of on-set styling. He was an English trichologist, 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. Estée 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 the 60s. The summer perfume. Aqua de Parma Colonia. About $130 at Sephora for the 3.4 oz. She wore it during the filming of We Go to Monte Carlo in the early 1950s. Bergamot. Neroli. Orange flower. Lemon. The Italian Riviera in a glass bottle. Aqua de Parma was founded in Parma in 1916 and has been making the same eau de cologne for over 100 years. In the same yellow tube. In the same formulation. Audrey wore it before she was Audrey. Before Roman Holiday. Before Givenchy. It was already there. The perfume she never got to wear. Creed Spring Flower. Full Creed pricing at the boutique but available for a fraction at discounters like Jama Shop and Fragrance X. Olivier 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. Spring Flower hit shelves in 1996, three 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 Paisible in the Swiss village of Tolochenaz. 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 pounds 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 Doorn three years before her death. The Audrey Hepburn Cultivar is hard to source commercially in the United States. The closest substitute is Tulipa purissima, 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 Dotti, 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. Penne a la vodka, her Hollywood comfort food. Bouffe à la cuillère, Givenchy's favorite, the one she made when he came to visit Switzerland. Mousse au chocolat, 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 Madeleine pan. Nordic ware. Around $20 at Amazon or Target. The Williams Sonoma version is closer to $50 if you want the upgrade. Luca remembered the Sunday tray exactly. Toast, quince 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 Madeleine'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. Heinz. $4 at any grocery store on earth. This is not a joke. Audrey Hepburn put Heinz ketchup on her pasta. The recipe is in Audrey at Home. The cookbook. Penne, butter, extra virgin olive oil, a few squirts of Heinz, Emmentaler cheese, finished with an Italian technique called mantecare. 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 Givenchy 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 Heinz 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 Petit Bateau striped tops constantly through the 50s and 60s. A classic St. James meridian shirt around $110. The Petit Bateau Mariniere, $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 Givenchy. 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 every day 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 video.