This week we’re celebrating the inimitable screen and style icon, Audrey Hepburn, aristocratic star of the silver screen and towering philanthropist.
This coming Saturday, May the 4th, would have been her 90th birthday. Born in Brussels, she spent her childhood bouncing between Belgium, England and the Netherlands, studying ballet, voice, and theater before her breakout Hollywood role as the love interest of Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday.
She went on to star in some of Hollywood’s most beloved Golden Age films, including My Fair Lady, Funny Face, and in her defining role as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The black Givenchy dress she wore in that film’s opening sequence is often cited as one of the 20th century’s most iconic items of clothing and is perhaps the most famous “little black dress” of all time. (Though the three dresses Hubert de Givenchy originally provided supposedly revealed “too much leg” for the liking of Paramount’s studio censors, so the lower half was slightly modified by famed Hollywood costume designer Edith Head — who, as an aside, was the model for The Incredibles' Edna Mode. Incidentally, one of those three dresses was auctioned off in 2006 to an anonymous buyer for nearly $1,000,000. The money helped build a school in Calcutta.)
Beginning in the late 1960s, she gradually retired from film and transitioned to humanitarian work, usually centered around the United Nations Children’s Fund, better known as UNICEF. As a result of her privileged international childhood, she spoke 5 languages — English, Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian — skills which served her well when she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador of UNICEF in 1989. For the last 4 years of her life she focused on field missions to far-flung countries in Africa, Asia, and Central America. In December of 1992 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A month later, she died of appendiceal cancer at her home in Switzerland.
Despite her death in 1993, her legacy continues to live on through film, fashion, and her philanthropic work — and of course in the yoga mats we’ve created to celebrate her life: Audrey After Dinner and Audrey Is Fair.
Audrey After Dinner pays homage to one of the most iconic women in history and her youthful glamour, personality, and contributions to both film and fashion.
Audrey Is Fair is stylish, radiant, sophisticated, stunning, classy and fabulous, just like the giantess of the screen who inspired it.
A large part of what inspired us to create these designs is Audrey’s oft-communicated position about women and beauty: “The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure she carries or the way she combs her hair.” While Audrey was in fact beautiful, fashionable, and had a figure other women envied, she knew that those attributes were both superficial and fleeting, and that the only thing that really mattered was the lasting effect her humanitarian work had on the lives of others.
To follow in Audrey’s footsteps, please consider a contribution to UNICEF. You can also learn more about her life and times and her philanthropic passions at the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund.
(To make that easier for you, take 10% off this week only using the promo code AUDREY10 at checkout, good from Monday, 4/29 through Sunday, 5/5, and donate the difference!)