Audrey Hepburn has a lot to answer for, like idiots turning up to Tiffany's and actually expecting to be served breakfast, the icky 1996 Deep Blue Something hit Breakfast At Tiffany's and all women secretly wishing they were Audrey Hepburn.
Oh, and the terrible 1999 girlband Hepburn, too, which is possibly the most unforgivable of the lot. So – seeing how much pain, embarrassment and negative body image self-esteem issues Audrey Hepburn has managed to heap on the world from beyond the grave – we'd have expected that the only people who would be interested in buying Audrey Hepburn's little black dress from Breakfast At Tiffany's would be a secretive coalition of Catholic priests who would burn the dress and bury the ashes to rid it of evil spirits in accordance with the Bible. But what the hell do we know? In fact, Audrey Hepburn's little black dress from Breakfast At Tiffany's was sold at auction yesterday for £410,000 – seven times the asking price. Cuh – haven't these people heard of TK Maxx?
When it comes to celebrity auctions, everyone has their own little weakness. Maybe spending $100,000 on a couple of shirts from Brokeback Mountain gets you going, or perhaps you're keen to get your hands on a bread bin full of pegs owned by Syd Barrett. Who knows? Maybe you want to buy all of Marlon Brando's stuff or Cher's 500-year-old Jesus? Not us – we're not resting until we've netted ourselves the remote-controlled tank that Bruce Willis drove over Jane March's boobs in the bath in the 1994 erotic thriller The Colour Of Night and nothing else.
But for quite a lot of extremely wealthy people with bizarre interests in clothes worn by dead women, the ultimate piece of celebrity memorabilia is the little black dress that Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast At Tiffany's. We've known for quite some time that Audrey Hepburn's dress would be auctioned off, but the actual auction of the Audrey Hepburn Breakfast At Tiffany's dress took place yesterday, and it didn't disappoint.
Even though people were basically bidding on a 45-year-old piece of fabric that smells of cats, smoke, banjos and the grey-haired man from The A Team, the bidding went crazy and the pre-sale estimate of £50,000 quickly fell by the wayside. Eventually the dress was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for £410,000 – the highest-ever price paid for a dress made for a film about a woman who talks funny.
Happily, the money raised from the sale of Audrey Hepburn's black dress will go to a good cause – helping underprivileged children in Africa. And, on finding out that the dress sold for $410,000, head of the City Of Joy charity Dominic Lapierre had tears in his eyes, as he told Reuters:
"There are tears in my eyes. I am absolutely dumbfounded to believe that a piece of cloth which belonged to such a magical actress will now enable me to buy bricks and cement to put the most destitute children in the world into schools."
While it's heartwarming to know that Audrey Hepburn's dress will help people who need it most, £410,000 is still a lot of money for a dress. We've been doing the maths and – on the basis that one William Shatner kidney stone costs £14,000 – the winner of Audrey Hepburn's dress could have instead put their £410,000 into making a crown studded with 29 different things that have been pissed out of the end of Captain Kirk's todger. So who looks silly now, huh?
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