“She is what people mean when they say they want to look ‘classic and timeless,’ or ‘elegant but no fuss,’” says Lily Kaizer, owner of luxury vintage wedding-dress salon Happy Isles.
The “Lucky” (Almost) Wedding Dress
While filming 1953’s Roman Holiday, Hepburn was engaged to English industrialist James Hanson. So she commissioned the Fontana sisters, who also collaborated with Edith Head on Hepburn’s costumes in the film, to design her wedding dress.
Elegant and pared-down, Hepburn’s first wedding dress offered a glimpse into a fashion icon’s definitive perspective: demure boatneck, long sleeves, and a playful high-low hemline. Ultimately, she called off the nuptials and asked the sisters to donate the design. “ to be worn by another girl for her wedding, perhaps someone who couldn’t ever afford a dress like mine—the most beautiful, poor Italian girl you can find,” the future UNICEF ambassador reportedly said.
The couturiers found a recipient, Amiable Altobella, and invited her to their Rome atelier for alterations. “The whole experience must have been incredible for ,” says Kerry Taylor, founder of London-based Kerry Taylor Auctions, of the couple’s visit from the city of Latina.
“They had three daughters and five grandchildren. Amiable said, ‘I’ve had a happy marriage, so the dress brought me luck’ and that was very much the feeling when the dress was handed over,” says Taylor, who auctioned the dress in 2009 for $23,000. “The whole family felt such pride at having had something so special and so unique.”
The Balmain Wedding Dress
After a whirlwind romance, Hepburn married American actor Mel Ferrer on September 25, 1954, in Bürgenstock, Switzerland.
Earlier that year, in March, she accepted an Oscar for her performance in Roman Holiday in a white lace dress by Givenchy, whom she first met in 1953 while shopping in his Paris atelier for Sabrina ensembles. But interestingly, Hepburn’s friend did not make her first official wedding dress. Instead, she walked down the aisle in a tea-length Pierre Balmain–designed frock with puff sleeves, a sprightly collar, and an oversized bow in the back. With elbow-length gloves and a flower crown, Hepburn’s bridal look still feels fresh and contemporary seven decades later. “She was her own woman,” says Sean Hepburn Ferrer, the couple’s only child. “If you think about what wedding dresses still are today—with all the froufrou and the long trains and all of that—she chose something modern for her first .”
After launching his first collection as an apprentice to designer Lucien Lelong in the late 1930s, Balmain did designs for the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. But “knowing how quickly went, was probably something off the rack,” says Hepburn Ferrer, who preserved his mother’s “dépouillé” Balmain and displays it in his “Intimate Audrey” exhibition. “She was kind of quick to make decisions.”
Hepburn Ferrer also wonders if his mother asked Givenchy for a wedding dress. He further muses that Hepburn’s 1957 Funny Face wedding dress, with its signature boatneck and drop waist, was a redo. “Maybe that’s an inside joke ,” he says. “Knowing them and their sense of humor, it could be that decided, ‘I couldn’t make your real wedding dress. So let me make you one .’”
The Givenchy Pink Wedding Dress
But in 1969, Givenchy did design Hepburn’s unexpected but classically chic pink wedding dress and matching headscarf to marry Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti.
The colorful minidress is “nontraditional, for sure, but it was also very reflective of the era,” says Cindy De La Hoz. The author of Audrey and Givenchy points to Hepburn’s Givenchy-designed Mod funnel-neck jackets and vibrant hues in 1966’s How to Steal a Million and her not-so-incognito white headscarf in the 1963 caper Charade.
“She was going for something different and reflective of where fashion was going,” adds De La Hoz, admiring Hepburn’s bridal accessories of white hosiery and her trademark flats. “Again, they were leading the way.”
