The film Breakfast At Tiffany’s, based loosely on Truman Capote’s novel, broke new ground not just in movie history - particularly in how women and sexuality is portrayed in film - but more remarkably for expanding our notions of what constitutes beauty.
Giving birth to the phenomenon that became the “little black dress”, Givenchy shattered the fashion taboos that prevented the everyday woman from wearing black, as well as creating a kind of fashion “class” accessible to all women, not just the wealthy or famous.
In Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast At Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, by Sam Wasson, Givenchy’s unique philosophy is described thus:
All of a sudden…chic was no longer this faraway thing only for the wealthy…[Givenchy] was a naturalist. He was about showing off the body as it was, not reshaping or idealizing it. He felt you didn’t need to use a lot of accessories or embellishment and based dresses on the shape of women as they were, not as he, or the culture, wanted them to be.
The ability to see innate beauty is crucial to a nuanced understanding and appreciation of life and reality. How we all see flowers can be instructive in this respect.
Many people seem to have a favorite flower. The most common favorites are often the ones that reveal themselves easily to the observer - like the rose, for instance. The rose has everything to make it a stand-out. Its superb fragrance, its perfection of form, and the fact that it grows on a bush that seems designed to showcase it, standing alone amongst thorns, one cannot but help but notice and love it.
But there are flowers that need a more sophisticated eye. They do not reveal themselves to the casual glance; perhaps because they are too small or too easily slip into the background to be noticed. Like the forget-me-not, for instance. I don’t know anyone who lists this tiny and delicate wonder of creation as their favorite.
Yet if, like Georgia O’Keefe’s poppies or Robert Maplethorpe’s lilies, the forget-me-not was put under the artist’s microscope I guarantee it would be acclaimed as every bit as beautiful and amazing as all other flowers, including the rose.
Seeing the innate beauty in everything requires a level of spiritual genius. One needs the ability to see beneath the mere surface of things, based on an understanding that all is not as it seems, with the awareness that the eye is not always a reliable gauge or arbiter of truth and reality. As Dr Herby Bell says in his book Quantum Sense: The New Common Sense: “We have come to a time in our evolution where we need to learn how to hold two truths simultaneously.”
