There are very few people who, after seeing William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953), featuring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, remained immune to the fashionable transformation the character of Princess Ann (Hepburn) goes through. During the film the princess’s personal style changes empowering her, allowing her to grow up and assume a new public role. Imprisoned within conventional and pretty female roles, longing for more freedom and a less strict style, the princess puts on a plain shirt with necktie, a long skirt, low-heeled court shoes and gloves and escapes from the palace where she is staying hiding in a laundry truck. 
Wandering around Rome after sleeping in Joe Bradley (Peck)’s room, the princess starts her transformation: first she swaps her court shoes for a pair of open Roman sandals, then she decides to have her long hair cut very short after seeing pictures of new and fashionable styles in a barber’s window. Italian hairstylist Maria Grazia Miccinilli De Rossi worked on the styles for this film. 
In later years, De Rossi made up most of the Hepburn hairstyles; the actress even asked De Rossi to follow her to New York to work on the TV movie Mayerling by Anatole Litvak. The Italian hair stylist – who used to work with her husband, make up artist Alberto De Rossi – was actually instrumental in creating the look Hepburn sports in the film. 
Princess Ann’s boyish haircut contributes to freeing her from the last vestiges of her old style and to opt for a more casual look.
The new version of Princess Ann – with her sleeves rolled up and a handkerchief replacing the more formal necktie – is ready to escape from the fairy-tale but boring world she lives in and have fun zigzagging around Rome on a scooter. Many Hepburn’s styles became legendary in the years that followed and the look she sported in Roman Holiday was definitely among them.
Mike Figgis’ short film Piazza di Spagna, recently premiered in the UK at London’s Somerset House, made me think about Roman Holiday. Figgis’ film, shot last summer on the Spanish Steps in Rome, features one of the main themes of Wyler’s Roman Holiday, transformation.
Figgis’ work features four plasma screens on which the film is shown (an idea already used by the director in his 2000 film Timecode), positioned in the middle of two pictures portraying tourists on the Spanish Steps by Italian photographer Massimo Vitali, famous for his images of various places populated by large masses of people.
The four films focus for around 17 minutes on four different characters – all played by actress Katy Saunders – who seem to have been randomly selected from Vitali’s images. While Princess Ann transformed into a more fashionable and liberated girl but essentially remained herself, Saunders splits into two fashion victims, a street thief and a French tourist, each with their own style and attire, though at times they end up doing the same actions, such as answering the phone, listening to music or moving around the same places.
Two of the characters might be total fashionistas and the film also has a sort of glamorous aura, but it’s actually the places shown in the background which are real symbols of fashion: 
Trinità dei Monti is one of the most iconic places in the world, its steps were often used for fashion shows and they are also a sort of stage where locals and tourists sit down to be seen or to watch other people from. Just across Piazza di Spagna there is also Via dei Condotti with its designer shops that are also featured in the film. 
The Figgis/Vitali project, produced by Vito Di Rosa and presented by agnès B, also called to my mind another movie connected with fashion and shot around the Spanish Steps, Luciano Emmer’s Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (Three Girls from Rome, 1952). This film that follows the vicissitudes of Marisa, Elena and Lucia, three young seamstresses, the movie was in part shot at the atelier of the Fontana sisters, also based near the Spanish Steps (will write more about it in a future post about the Sorelle Fontana fashion house; in the meantime, I’m posting here a brief extract of the film in Italian that shows the three girls having their lunch break on the Spanish Steps).
Figgis’ film might not be as iconic as Roman Holiday or as romantic as Three Girls from Rome, and there might not be any particular meaning behind it, yet the way the director seems to give life to Vitali’s photographs, creating a contrast between moving and static images is interesting and somehow strangely and fashionably mesmerising.
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