Givenchy · Dress
Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1961 — as worn by Audrey Hepburn
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The scene
In the film’s opening sequence, Holly Golightly arrives on Fifth Avenue at dawn and pauses before the windows of Tiffany & Co., the storefront still quiet around her as the city is only beginning to stir. She steps out in formal evening dress rather than daytime clothes, carrying coffee and a paper bag breakfast, and the contrast between black-tie polish and the near-empty early-morning street gives the moment its strange, floating calm.
At the window, Holly studies the jewellery displays with a private concentration that feels both ritualistic and aspirational. The gown turns her stop at Tiffany’s into something more than casual window-shopping: it places her inside the fantasy she is trying to inhabit, even while the coffee cup and pastry keep one foot in ordinary New York life. The dress helps define Holly immediately as a woman who performs sophistication with total conviction, using elegance as armour, self-invention, and invitation.
Blake Edwards and cinematographer Franz Planer frame the dress in long, clean lines against the glass, stone, and metal surfaces of the store façade. Its sleeveless black silhouette reads almost graphically in the pale morning light, allowing the column shape to register before the camera moves closer to Audrey Hepburn’s face. Outside Tiffany’s, the gown becomes the visual key to the entire film: controlled, refined, slightly aloof, and inseparable from the image of Holly standing alone with breakfast in hand before the window that gives the story its title.
In the film’s opening sequence, Holly Golightly arrives on Fifth Avenue at dawn and pauses before the windows of Tiffany & Co., the storefront still quiet around her as the city is only beginning to stir.
Hubert de Givenchy designed the black evening gown made for Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in the 1961 Paramount film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Givenchy founded his house in Paris in 1952, and his professional relationship with Hepburn became one of the most documented actor-designer collaborations in postwar film costume history. Auction records and museum descriptions identify this dress as a custom Givenchy creation made specifically for the production.
Christie’s catalogued the surviving example sold in 2006 as an evening gown of black Italian satin. That documented version is sleeveless and floor-length, with a fitted bodice, a distinctive cut-out décolleté at the back, a skirt slightly gathered at the waist, and a slit on one side; the waistband bears a Givenchy label. Publicly available sources also note that multiple versions of the dress were made, and Christie’s specifically distinguished the auctioned example from the version worn in the film’s opening scene.
On screen, the design appears as a narrow black sheath with a long vertical line that works with Hepburn’s movement and the film’s early-morning Fifth Avenue setting. Costume historians and fashion press consistently identify it as the dress worn for the opening Tiffany window sequence, the image most closely associated with Holly Golightly. Contemporary reporting and later exhibition coverage have treated that screen-used design as one of the defining little black dresses in cinema.
In December 2006, a surviving Givenchy example from Breakfast at Tiffany’s sold at Christie’s South Kensington for a record price for a dress made for a film, a documented milestone in the auction history of costume design.
Production Notes
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