Why Ava Gardner should be your vintage summer style pin-up
Reports in Vogue suggest that Leonardo DiCaprio has been cast as Frank Sinatra in a forthcoming Martin Scorsese-directed biopic, with Jennifer Lawrence set to play his second wife, the silver-screen starlet Ava Gardner.
The news serves as a reminder that Gardner, who died in Knightsbridge, London in 1990, was one of the most glamorous figures of her day – a woman whose classic sense of style still makes her an inspiring pin-up for fashion designers now.
Sinatra was Gardner’s third husband, and the true love of her life by all accounts. Images from the late 1940s, when they apparently began their affair at a Palm Springs party, to the mid-1950s, when they divorced, now read as Gardner’s best fashion chapter. Lawrence will get to try on surely the chicest costuming of her own career to date, imitating Gardner’s signature white cotton shirts, clingy mohair knitted tees and pretty cotton sundresses from that time.
Despite being taken 70 years ago, photographs of Gardner from the era still look chic now. She aptly used her classic clothing choices to show her softer side, or her sexy side, as she wished. The way she posed in photographs was always hyper-feminine–- she might coyly tuck her legs neatly to her side, or elongate her silhouette by standing on tiptoes, even with bare feet. “The most beautiful woman in the world” typically smiled too, which feels quite refreshing when compared with the moody models and celebrities we’re used to now.
“I adore Ava Gardner – she’s a total shirting icon,” says Pip Durell, founder of the London-based label With Nothing Underneath, of the retro pin-up who today dominates on her design mood board. Durell says that Gardner could take any style of shirt – mannish or fitted, smart or casual – and make it look chic. “For a woman in the 50s she worked the traditional feminine aesthetic with a shirt and full skirt,” she notes, “but also as a country girl originally, she loved that relaxed, weekend shirting look – the latter being my favourite for sure.”
Gardner was “discovered” and signed on a seven-year contract by MGM in 1941, aged 18, after her brother-in-law sent her photograph to the Hollywood studio’s offices. She came from obscurity – born in North Carolina, and raised in Virginia during the Great Depression. “Of course, we were poor. Everybody was poor,” she would later remember.
After a breakthrough role as femme fatale Kitty Collins in The Killers in 1946, she became “the most irresistible woman in Hollywood”, a movie star and a fixture on the social scene, known for her love of a good time as much as her good looks.
“I could dance all night, go straight to the studio at six,” she said according to the biography Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations. “After a nap in hair and makeup and a glass of champagne, I’d be ready for my close-up at nine.”
When she met Sinatra, his own career was in a lull – it was she who was the most in demand. Their life together was dramatic and filled countless newspaper column inches. “We were fighting all the time,” Gardner would remember. “Fighting and boozing. Breaking up, getting together again.” The rumour that they divorced in 1957 after she had a fling with Spanish matador Luis Miguel Dominguín only further added to her personal brand as the woman who “couldn’t be tamed”.
Gardner also courted the designers of her day with ease. She was a Balenciaga couture client, and Christian Dior was infatuated with her – her costumes for The Little Hut, in 1957, were some of the last he designed before his death.
She wore $1,000 dresses for her premieres – a fortune for the time. When she married Sinatra, costume designer Howard Greer created a grey and pink wedding dress for her. In the golden age of cinema, couturiers and costumiers flowed freely from stage commissions to everyday ones for their star clients.
Her off-duty outfits were more accessible, and were copied by all. Crisp shirts tucked into high-waisted skirts and shorts, waist-defining belts and figure-skimming black dresses. Who wouldn’t want to get that look even now, in 2024?
“Ava Gardner, with her timeless elegance and sophisticated style, has always been a muse,” says Isobel Elphinstone, founder of the British brand Cossie & Co. “She embraced classic silhouettes with a touch of glamour.”
It’s hard to talk about Gardner’s impeccable summer style without mentioning her swimwear collection, too. An early adopter of the two-piece bikini, images of her in high-waisted styles have served as inspiration to designers hoping to replicate her vintage beach look decades later.
“The high-waisted bikini bottoms that Ava typically wore have been a real focus for us, the shape elongates the legs and accentuates the waistline, creating a very flattering silhouette,” notes Elphinstone. “This kind of classic style evokes a sense of nostalgia and retro charm that appeals to women of all ages and body types – and is still very relevant today.”
Try these...
Gingham high-waist bikini top, £75, and bottoms, £75 Cossie & Co; Hemp shirt, £110, With Nothing Underneath; Silk scarf, £75, Le Scarf
Mohair T-shirt, £44.99, H&M; Priyanka belt, £55, Hush; High-waist pleat-front shorts, £25, Marks & Spencer; Elena dress, £190, Pink City Prints
