For the last year we’ve been accustomed to Ariana Grande in full Glinda mode. In the lead-up to Wicked, the singer embraced method dressing to the fullest possible extent, scouring the earth for every last pink dress. But now, it seems that Grande has set her sights on a different icon: Audrey Hepburn.
While Grande embraced the wide-eyed ingenue archetype during the Wicked press tour, her references to Hepburn have become much more overt. Perhaps the most obvious indicator has been her above-the-eyebrow bangs—one of Hepburn’s beauty signatures. But, as of late, she has also been paying homage with her fashion.
Grande and her stylist Mimi Cuttrell have embraced vintage—particularly from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, an era when Hepburn was starring in movies such as My Fair Lady and Roman Holiday. She started off subtly, wearing a black-and-white polka-dot ballgown from Pierre Balmain’s 1963 collection, which could draw to mind Hepburn’s dress in Funny Face. At the Golden Globes first-time nominees brunch, she chose a tea-length dress in champagne satin from Yves Saint Laurent’s 1959 collection for Christian Dior. For the 2025 Palm Springs International Film Festival, Louis Vuitton dressed her in strapless dress with a voluminous ankle-length skirt.
If the Hepburn-adjacent styling wasn’t clear enough before, the 2025 Golden Globes sealed the deal. She wore a pale yellow strapless dress with an embellished bodice from Hubert de Givenchy’s 1966 couture collection along with opera gloves and a diamond choker. There’s hardly a fashion friendship more famous than the one between Hepburn and de Givenchy, which makes Grande’s Old Hollywood look seem all the more significant.
TikTok sleuths suspect that Grande is gunning for her next role: an Audrey Hepburn biopic. As of January 2023, Rooney Mara was attached to star in a Luca Guadagnino-helmed production but it’s been relatively quiet. While Lily Collins has also been suggested for such a role, perhaps Ariana Grande is using fashion to nominate herself. Whatever this is, it seems to be 2025’s answer to the Madonna biopic bootcamp.
