Tagged: audrey hepburn, breakfast at tiffany's, givenchy, holly golightly, marily monroe, modern woman, style icons
Lula Mae Barnes
Elegant and free-spirited, Holly Golightly (the Breakfast at Tiffany's infamous style icon played by Audrey Hepburn), embodies all the admirable traits of a modern woman. What is so attractive about Golightly, however, isn't her impeccable taste for Tiffany's jewels and chic Givenchy gowns, but rather her modest background as a simple, Moon River-strumming hillbilly, whose real name was Lula Mae Barnes.
Despite this important detail about her character, most images of and references to Golightly, and more famously, to Audrey Hepburn as Golightly, depict her as a classy uptown New Yorker. Also surprising is the fact that the fragile free spirit that Truman Capote captured in the character of Holly Golightly was supposed to be played by Marilyn Monroe. And most tragically altered from Capote's original text was Golightly's happy ending with Paul, which in fact, did not happen in the novella. Golightly remained a free-spirit and a world traveler.
It is with these often-omitted details that I try to envision Holly Golightly's style, which to me, is not simply high-fashion labels and expensive jewels, but a bit of wide-eyed innocence and mismatch of high-brow and low-brow. Style is an odd thing. It is never simply the clothes you wear, but also who you are beneath those clothes. When you think of the time of day when Golightly donned her full length black gown, tiara, pearls, and elbow-lengthed gloves (think why she had sunglasses on), it's apparent she was an oddball. The "normal" classy outfit of the time would have been a cutesy daytime Chanel suit.
Although we look to Golightly as the epitome of class and elegance, the irony is she was just a designer-groupie. (After all, Golightly couldn't afford anything at Tiffany's). But it is precisely this, the fragility of her dream, which endears her to us. Like so many of us, she was but a dreamer, dreaming the American dream.
posted by voteinstyle on july 9, 2008