There is some stories we just want to believe. Audrey Hepburn walking into a little shoe shop in Lucerne to pick up her ballet flats is one of them. The myth has everything going for it: a style legend, a discreet Swiss address and a pair of shoes that never went out of fashion. The reality is quite different.
A perfect story
To be fair, the tale is almost too good not to share. Audrey Hepburn, whose silhouette still inspires fashion decades after her death, would have had a favorite Swiss shop, far from the big Paris houses. Walk through the same door, and you could leave with a piece of her wardrobe.
Audrey Hepburn on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles, 1953, wearing her signature ballet flats. © All Right Reserved. Credit: Novars Media on Instagram.
All it took was one viral video. While visiting Switzerland, Australian content creator Ainslie Harvey filmed herself heading to Day, a shoe store she’d heard was behind the actress’s famous flats. Except Hepburn never set foot there, as an investigation by Swiss outlet 20 Minuten confirms.
So where did the mix-up come from? There is a real link between the British actress and the Swiss brand, founded in 1935. It’s just much more recent than the myth suggests.
The truth behind the legend
In 2017, Licio Greco, the brand’s owner and designer, bought eight pairs of ballet flats that had belonged to Hepburn at a Christie’s auction in London. Those personal shoes became an inspiration for Day, which paid tribute to them with a capsule collection launched in 2024.
Hepburn's ballet flat collection in Zurich at Day. Credit: @Day.Switzerland on Instagram
That’s the detail that changes everything. Day didn’t make Audrey Hepburn’s ballet flats. Her ballet flats inspired Day. It may sound like a small nuance, but it rewrites the whole story. What was really about style heritage has turned, retelling after retelling, into gossip about the shopping habits of a star who died in 1993.
Hepburn did a lot to make the ballet flat a symbol of easy, elegant, almost casual chic. But her style was shaped by her work with designers like Givenchy and Salvatore Ferragamo, and by her past as a dancer. Her simplicity was rarely left to chance.
In the end, the story says a lot about how we relate to fashion icons. We don’t just want to wear the same shoes as Audrey Hepburn. We want to know where she bought them, what she loved and where she spent her time. Social media understands the power of these stories, which can turn a shop into an almost mythical destination. The problem starts when inspiration gets mistaken for history.
One thing is true: Day really does own a piece of Audrey Hepburn’s wardrobe. The eight pairs of ballet flats that actually belonged to her are on display in the store. And that’s a story worth telling on its own.