“And another thing…” Audrey Hepburn tells Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina, “never a briefcase in Paris and never an umbrella. It’s the law.”
I recently lost my favorite black, bamboo-handle umbrella, purchased several years ago on a rainy afternoon from the flagship Brooks Brothers store on Madison and 44th Street. And I no longer have the beautiful raincoat my mother, who had clearly not listened to Audrey Hepburn, bought me at Brooks Brothers for my first trip to Paris.
This seems fitting as the loss of the 44th Street store has become a reality. Somehow, I can’t seem to bring myself to walk over and see the demise. So many memories…
The following is a blog post I wrote in 2012:
Breakfast with Audrey
When my mother took me to Bloomingdale’s I wanted to move in. There is no logic to this. Except that the world inside, with its living– and bedrooms set up seemed perfect.
I never knew anyone else had this feeling. Then I read Capote:
“Just get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there.”
The thing is -- you want to go to Tiffany’s with Audrey Hepburn. After you’ve seen the film, you are sunk. There is no Holly without Audrey. The real Holly is far from perfect and Hepburn was so stunning on so many levels that, no matter how hard she tried, she could not prevent her inner goodness from seeping through.
Another store with a proud look was Brooks Brothers; my one-year career at prep school gave me an excuse to shop there for boy’s oxford-cloth shirts and tweed blazers. I was fascinated by the mostly-male sales help. What was their back story? I came up with an idea, The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, that imagined a young man and his mother, a former model, coming to terms with their lives as they come and go from their apartment in Greenwich Village.
Letitia Baldridge once wrote an Op-Ed piece about shopping yesterday called I Shopped Them All: “It was such a safe, predictable world. It was also intensely personal — everything directed at you and no one else.”