Hubert de Givenchy met Audrey Hepburn in 1953, expecting Katharine

Hubert de Givenchy met Audrey Hepburn in 1953, expecting Katharine. The actress arrived at his avenue George V atelier wearing ballet flats and a gondolier's shirt. She was twenty-four. He was twenty-six. She needed a wardrobe for Sabrina, and he had a collection of samples that happened to fit her frame exactly. The mistake became the most documented friendship in twentieth-century fashion.

But Hepburn was not Givenchy's only muse, and the house's history cannot be told through her alone. Three women shaped the maison's identity across six decades: Bettina Graziani, who gave Givenchy its first signature; Hepburn, who made that signature legible to the world; and Marisa Berenson, who carried it into the Seventies when everything else had changed.

Bettina Graziani and the blouse that launched a house

Bettina Graziani was already famous when Givenchy opened his atelier in 1952. She had modelled for Balmain, Fath, and Dior. She wore her dark hair short and her collars open. Photographers called her simply Bettina, the way they later called Veruschka or Twiggy by a single name.

Givenchy had worked for Schiaparelli before going independent. He understood structure, but his instinct was towards ease. For his first collection, he designed a white cotton blouse with broderie anglaise sleeves and a drawstring neckline. Bettina wore it with a long black skirt. The combination was photographed for L'Officiel and Vogue within a week. The blouse sold in the hundreds. Clients began asking for "the Bettina."

It was not a revolutionary garment. The revolution was in its refusal to be complicated. Dior's New Look was still dominant in 1952, and most couture required scaffolding. Givenchy's blouse required nothing but shoulders. It was separates dressing before separates had a name in Paris.

Bettina modelled for Givenchy through the mid-Fifties, but her influence lasted longer. The house's reputation for clean lines and unforced elegance—qualities that would later attach to Hepburn—began with Graziani's ability to make a peasant blouse look like the only logical thing to wear. She married Aly Khan in 1960 and left modelling. Givenchy continued to send her clothes. She wore them in Saint-Moritz and Deauville, where the paparazzi still followed her, and where his name appeared in the captions.

Audrey Hepburn and the little black dress that wasn't Chanel

The Hepburn partnership is over-mythologised, but the facts remain useful. She wore Givenchy in eight films between 1954 and 1981. The black Sabrina gown—strapless, floor-length, with an organza overlay—was credited on-screen to Edith Head, who won the Oscar. Givenchy designed it. The confusion was contractual, not creative.

What mattered more than any single dress was the consistency of the collaboration. Hepburn's on-screen wardrobe and her private wardrobe were nearly identical by the early Sixties. The pink coat-dress from Charade, the white turban from How to Steal a Million, the Burberry-adjacent trench from the same film—these were Givenchy designs that doubled as Hepburn's off-duty uniform. She wore his clothes to premieres, to UNICEF appearances, to the grocery. The line between character and person blurred until it was irrelevant.

The little black dress from Breakfast at Tiffany's is now more famous than the film. It was a sheath cut from Italian satin, sleeveless, with a low back and a 19-inch waist. Hepburn wore it with a five-strand pearl choker, opera gloves, and sunglasses at dawn. The dress was auctioned in 2006 for £467,200. The buyer was anonymous.

Givenchy later said, in an interview with The Independent, that Hepburn taught him about simplicity. She disliked fuss. She preferred black, white, and beige. She wanted clothes that moved when she moved and stayed still when she stood still. He was already inclined in that direction, but her preferences became his discipline.

The partnership ended only with her death in 1993. Givenchy dressed her for the funeral. The house sent a private note to her family. It was not published.

Marisa Berenson and the Seventies nobody remembers

Marisa Berenson does not appear in most Givenchy retrospectives, which is an editorial failure. She was the house's most visible client between 1969 and 1975, a period when Hepburn had stepped back from film and Givenchy's relevance was under question. Berenson was the granddaughter of Elsa Schiaparelli. She modelled for Vogue and appeared in Visconti's Death in Venice and Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. She wore Givenchy to both premieres.

Her look was different from Hepburn's. Taller, broader in the shoulder, more overtly decorative. Givenchy's designs for her leaned into volume: capes, wide trousers, tunic dresses with asymmetric hems. The silhouette was looser than the Fifties and Sixties work, but the discipline remained. No print unless it was geometric. No embellishment unless it was structural.

Berenson's influence is clearest in Givenchy's 1971 collection, which featured wide-legged palazzo trousers in silk crêpe and matching tunics with deep armholes. The pieces were designed to layer. They anticipated the kind of modular dressing that would dominate the Eighties but looked, in 1971, like a miscalculation. French Vogue gave the collection two pages. American Vogue gave it four. Berenson wore a white version of the tunic-and-trouser set to the Cannes Film Festival that May. The photographs ran everywhere.

She was never as famous as Hepburn, and her association with Givenchy was never as mythologised. But she kept the house visible during a decade when most couture houses were struggling to remain coherent. When Givenchy retired in 1995, Berenson attended the farewell show. She wore black trousers and a white shirt. The outfit could have come from 1952 or 1971 or last season. That was the point.

What the muses share

All three women shared a physical similarity: narrow shoulders, small busts, long necks. Givenchy's cutting was consistent because his models were consistent. He did not adapt his line to different bodies; he refined a single ideal across forty years.

But the deeper similarity was temperament. None of the three women performed fashion. They wore it, used it, and moved on. Bettina Graziani married into European aristocracy and disappeared from the industry. Hepburn became a diplomat. Berenson acted, then retreated. They were not interested in being fashion icons, which is precisely why they became them.

Givenchy retired in 1995. The house has since been led by John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Riccardo Tisci, Clare Waight Keller, and now Matthew Williams. Each designer has referenced the archives. None has found another muse. The house's identity is now tied to product—the Antigona bag, the logo T-shirt—rather than to a woman who defines it.

That may be a commercial necessity. It is also a loss. Givenchy's best work was never about clothes alone. It was about the conversation between a designer and a client who trusted him enough to wear the same thing for thirty years. That kind of loyalty is rarer now, and harder to monetise. But it built a house.