BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
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BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
Truman Capote’s iconic novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s follows an unnamed writer in New York City, who meets the fabulous and eccentric Holly Golightly, an it girl who always loses her keys and has a few guys chasing her affections at a given time.
In 1961, the unforgettable novella was adapted in a film starring Audrey Hepburn. In the opening scene, Holly takes a bright yellow taxi to Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue and gazes wistfully at the jewels winking behind the glass.
“It calms me down right away. Nothing bad could happen to you there,” Holly tells the writer in the novel. “If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.”
The timeless tale highlights the aspiration of the American Dream, the idea that heritage, glamor and big city life can transform you into someone brand new.
A bit of backstory
Capote was already a well-known writer with a New York Times-bestselling novel to his name when he sold an early draft of Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Harper’s Bazaar for $2000. The vaunted lifestyle magazine eventually chose not to run the novella; insiders say that the top-bosses at Hearst were worried the working-class raciness and street speak in the story would offend Tiffany’s, a major advertiser.
Clay Felker, the editor of Esquire, called Capote as the now-annoyed writer was vacationing in Athens and paid $3000 more for the story, a lot of money at the time.
“Normally, a magazine’s sales are the highest on the first day it’s out and it goes down geometrically from then. In this case, once the reviews came out [after the book release], the sales took off once again,” Felker recalled.
Holly Golightly was
rumored to be based on different women, one of whom unsuccessfully sued Truman Capote for libel. For his part, Capote said Holly Golightly was a composite of three women—two were alive, and the last had died in Africa.
While we’ll never know who the real Holly Golightly is, there’s no doubt Capote wrote himself into the character: both author and heroine are witty dreamers from the deep South, surviving on their charm and the favors of strangers, who move to New York City to make it big.
What we love about it
With dreamy prose, Capote draws you into the charming world of his fiction, a shimmering New York City where anything is possible, but life is stalked by the heartbreak of loss and leaving the past behind.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s remains immortal in the cultural imagination, even sixty-five years after its release. In Gossip Girl, Blair Waldorf, the queen bee of the Upper East Side, watched the film every Sunday with brunch and fantasized Holly Golightly-esque scenarios about her own life.
Stylish? Iconic.
Holly Golightly’s eclectic, girly style—flirty black dresses, cat-eye sunglasses, a crystalline brooch—remain iconic and easily recognizable to this day.
The fashion designer Kate Spade’s whimsical creations were often likened to the heroine’s style. In 2021, Beyoncé embodied Holly’s glamorous flair in a Tiffany’s ad campaign, riding in a limousine in Manhattan, her honey-blonde hair drawn into an alluring chignon, a dreamy smile lingering on her ruby-red lips.
Givenchy designed the infamous little black dress which appears in the film. In 2006, the dress was auctioned for more than $900,000 in London; the proceeds went to building a school for impoverished children in Kolkata.
Written by Iman Sultan
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