Thoroughly modern Audrey Hepburn

From Edwina Ings-Chambers for The Sunday Times, November 29, 2009

Recent Elegance Dilemma number one: wearing a simple Grecian-style maxi dress for dinner, only to have my friend fall about laughing when she saw it: “No need for a ballgown, Ed. It’s just moules.” Ouch.

RED number two: arguing with myself about whether it was okay to wear trainers to work in the pouring rain: they’re practical, but not stylish. I wore them, but judged myself for it.

RED number three: finding myself in a nightclub, screaming at some sloane yobbers, after they repeatedly called me a “f***ing slag” for pointing out they’d spilt their beer over me.

What has a verbal ear-clipping got to do with elegance, you ask? Well, it’s not all about sartorial issues, you see; as Dita von Teese puts it: “Elegance is all about the way your treat people and about a certain generosity — the right kind of generosity with a dash of humility.” I have to admit that, in all three instances, I had fallen short of the Audrey Index.

Ah, Audrey. Hepburn, that is. She’s still our elegance touchstone, our patron saint of style and grace. What was her secret? “I think what you learn from Audrey is simplicity: in her clothes, in her house and her decorating, and also in her life,” says Tanja Star-Busmann, a lifelong friend of the star (they met in London when she was 15 and Hepburn was 21 and on the brink of stardom). Over the years, Hepburn would send her clothes that she no longer needed or wore. “Huge boxes would turn up unexpectedly. It was incredible.” Star-Busmann has now consigned some of them — including Givenchy pieces aplenty — to auction next month. Browsing through the catalogue, simplicity is a recurring theme. Many items are low key — a Breton-striped jumper here, a tweed jacket there — and embellishment is minimal: fabric and cut speak for themselves.

Yet here’s the rub: Hepburn’s heyday was almost half a century ago. Life — the world — was different then. Men didn’t call you a slag. Equally, ladies weren’t ladettes running around town, behaving badly. Movie stars acted like royalty; now we have reality-TV stars who have realised that subtlety gets you precisely nowhere. “There is so much self-promoting,” says the author Kathleen Tessaro, who wrote the bestselling novel Elegance. “With Facebook, Twitter and the like, we are all engaged in a nonstop daily PR exercise.” Far from being self-promoting, Hepburn turned to charity work in her later years. Fashion, too, moved more slowly; now it hurtles forward at the speed of the information superhighway. So could it be that elegance is no longer a sustainable resource in the modern world?

Jordan Christy, a publicist for Warner Bros Records, thinks not. More than that, she’s come out fighting for a return to elegance with her book How to Be a Hepburn in a Hilton World (Center Street £13.99). “My mom always says it was a simpler time back in Audrey’s day,” she says. “But we can still be contemporary versions of those classy women.” It’s time to turn away from “the stupid girls”: that’s Hilton, Lohan et al. “It's a vicious circle,” she says. “We see these women making headline news, and girls think they are the current role models. When we appear to enjoy reading about their lewd behaviour, it appears that we think they’re suitable role models, too.”

Her solution to this decline is a simple three-point plan. First: respect yourself — “everything else comes after that”. Second: wear underwear. “We’ve all seen enough images of celebrities climbing into limos without pants to know it’s never a good idea.” Third: raise your standards. “We have become a society of low standards in everything, from love to the job we take and how to speak. If you want something better, set your standards higher.”

Christy may be on to something. Still, underwear aside, what about clothes? How can we channel what Hepburn taught us without looking like a time-travelling film extra? Most style observers agree that sartorial elegance requires not only self-knowledge, but the ability to pare things down: elegance comes from the Latin eligere, meaning to select.

Amanda Brooks, the author of I Love Your Style (HarperPaperbacks £12.99), says elegance “means refinement, and you have to know yourself quite well; it’s a process of taking what’s extraneous and keeping what’s essential. I think a lot of people try to dress things up by adding”. Modern icons of elegance, for her, include Angelina Jolie, who “wears clothes that look well on her body, but isn’t trying to define herself through them”.

Matthew May, the author of In Pursuit of Elegance (Broadway Business £14.54), explains the concept further. “The full power of elegance is achieved when the maximum impact is exacted with the minimum input,” he says. Sometimes, he says, we need to think about “what we need to say ‘no’ to”. It’s a concept you can apply to everything, according to May, even manners.

So check where you’re going for dinner and realise you can leave the maxi dress untouched sometimes (even Hepburn wore T-shirts when she wasn’t on duty) or keep old shoes you’re not worried about mussing by the front door for wet days. As for countering boorishness, Pamela Clarke Keogh, author of What Would Audrey Do?, points out that “Audrey operated at a certain level, and people rose to her level. So don’t drag yourself down”. Learn to take the high road and rise above. You know as well as I do it’s what Hepburn would have done and would still do — without any tweeting to tell us about it.