The Cinegenic Style of Hubert de Givenchy

a tribute to an innovator, and one of Paris fashion's leading lights

IF YOU WERE to ask a group of cinephiles to name some iconic film posters, this one might get a mention:

Theatrical poster for the American release of the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s Designed by Robert McGinnis. Copyright © 1961 by Paramount Pictures Corporation and Jurow Shepherd Productions. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It's an important image, but not for the reasons that might initially spring to mind. The movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) is based on a book by Truman Capote and directed by Blake Edwards, who also directed the Pink Panther films. It has a notable cast, including the world-famous actor and humanitarian Audrey Hepburn, Patricia Neal, who was married to Roald Dahl, George Peppard of The A-Team fame, and Buddy Ebsen, who played Jed Clampett in The Beverley Hillbillies. But none of these mildly interesting facts make this image especially important in our cultural history; it's the dress, or more accurately, what the dress represents. This artist’s depiction of the black cocktail dress worn by Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s signifies one of the most era-defining artistic collaborations of the last century, and it was designed by the French couturier Hubert de Givenchy.

I don’t want to give it more importance than it deserves - it’s just a frock after all - but its totemic power belies the fact that it was the result of a chance meeting in which two people from different artistic spheres came together. Highly-regarded in their own fields, they created a brand that was every bit as successful as their individual endeavours, and they were inextricably linked thereafter. This was not a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, but of the addition of another dimension to their respective careers; a match, as they say, made in heaven. But more of that later. Let us begin with the frocks.