A Burberry trench coat once owned by Audrey Hepburn will go to auction on Sept. 27 at Christie’s London with an estimate of 6,000 pounds to 8,000 pounds ($7,683- $10,244). At the Real Real, an online consignment site, the asking price for a similar used women’s Burberry trench coat is currently $645. Christie’s, then, is guessing that its coat’s association with Hepburn gives it a $7,000 to $10,000 premium.
Why $7,000 to $10,000, though? Why not $70,000? $100,000?
“It’s a very difficult question to answer,” said Adrian Hume-Sayer, Christie’s director of private collections. “How do you put a price on provenance?”
It’s one that Hume-Sayer and his team at Christie’s are grappling with as they arrange hundreds of objects consigned by Hepburn’s two sons for a standalone sale, “The Personal Collection of Audrey Hepburn.” “What we’re selling, really,” said Hume-Sayer, “is the connection to the individual.”
The “Hepburn” Premium
Whereas a car transports you places and a house gives you shelter, a painting or a piece of movie memorabilia is, for all intents and purposes, worthless. Art and collectibles don’t have a use value. Yet the art market—capricious, opaque, and confusing as it might be—has managed to establish a comparatively static series of prices: Anyone with a Picasso can expect to sell it for a minimum (and maximum) dollar amount.
Those expectations are dashed, though, when it comes to objects with celebrity provenance. A ring owned by Nancy Reagan was “worth” about $8,000, but sold for $319,500 at Christie’s New York. Across the Atlantic, a gray purse once owned by Margaret Thatcher that looked thrift-store ready (high estimate: $2,272) sold for an astonishing $24,635, or about $10,000 more than a new Birkin bag from Hermès.
Similarly, the sheen of an Audrey Hepburn provenance has already proven wildly lucrative. In 2006, the little black Givenchy dress she wore for the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s sold for 467,200 pounds (its a high estimate was 70,000 pounds). Five years later, in 2011, the “Ascot” dress Hepburn wore in My Fair Lady, estimated at $300,000, sold for $3.7 million.
There is an empirical basis, in other words, for applying what you could call a “Hepburn premium” to her belongings.The question is how much that premium should actually be.
“Almost whatever you decide, people will disagree with you,” Hume-Sayer said. “It’s just so subjective to one’s own instincts and gut feelings and preferences.”
The Sale
The auction will take place in two parts: a live sale, comprising no more than 200 lots—any more than that and the sale wouldn’t fit into one day—and an online sale, which will run from Sept. 19 to Oct. 3.