Return of the doe-eyed siren

30 June 2015 - 02:00 By Mark Hudson

For the past decade and more the market in retro-glamour cards and bedsit wall posters has been dominated by the doe-like eyes and slender neck of Audrey Hepburn. Using the 65th anniversary of Hepburn's appearance as a chorus girl at Ciro's nightclub, a new exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery looks at the way Hepburn collaborated with photographers in the creation of her persona.For Irving Penn, photographing for American Vogue, Hepburn's expressive eyes and cropped dark hair were perfect for a new kind of high-contrast fashion photography that has come to embody our idea of classic 1950's style.Combining European sophistication with Hollywood high gloss, the impact of the gradually developing Hepburn image, with those perpetually startled eyes, is truly hypnotic. The appeal of her general thinness to our Size Zero era is obvious.The promise of the early photographs leads inexorably towards the final image of her walking through a Somali refugee camp in 1992, her eyes far away, just months before her death from cancer aged only 63...

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