Handyside, Fiona. "`Paris isn't for Changing`Planes; it's for Changing your Outlook': Audrey Hepburn as European Star in 1950s France." French Cultural Studies 14.3: 288

Fiona Handyside’s article follows the path of Audrey Hepburn’s career that resulted in her image as the quintessential “European star” to the American audience. In the 1950s, she was the antithesis of “busy contemporaries” such as Marilyn Monroe, with her generically “European” accent, slender frame, and air of confidence. This became the ultimate portrayal of a European woman as Americans wanted to believe it. Hepburn’s image as such was the product of two different forces: Hollywood studios, and European couture houses, namely that of Givenchy. Beginning with Sabrina, Givenchy and Hepburn formed a life-long partnership, and his clothing was present in many situations throughout her life. This made promotion for Sabrina and other films seamless, as the ties between designer and muse stretched across cinema, journalism, and advertising. Hepburn wore Givenchy in her 1954 wedding to Mel Ferrer, enabling further personification of her own “star style.”
The focus of Sabrina is the transformation of a young girl via Paris and Givenchy designs, culminating in a happy marriage. The progression of this plot uses not only narrative, but also the visual imagery of wardrobe to convince the viewer. In the famed scene at the train station, Hepburn’s Givenchy-designed gray suit owns the screen, as the unrecognized sophisticate stops William Holden’s character dead in his tracks. The clothing is placed above the narrative at this point, defining a character in a way that words could not. Sabrina was the beginning the association between Hepburn, Paris, and Givenchy: the city itself is the symbol of style, transformation, and the revelation of a new kind of femininity.

Smith, Dina M. "Global Cinderella: Sabrina (1954), Hollywood, and Post-War Internationalism." Cinema Journal 41.4 (2002): 27.

Smith’s complex article focuses on the relationship between the United States and Europe post-World War II, in the framework of politics, foreign policy, economics, and the cinema. Films of that era, like Sabrina, she argues, twist the classic Cinderella story to fit the gendered metaphors intrinsic in foreign policy of the time, namely that Europe, as the “culturally savvy orphan” is in need of a “strong rich man,” like America, to save it. The Europe of these films was like a “postcard fantasy” to sheltered Americans: Paris was marketed as a one-dimensional entity that was the visualization of the notion of culture. Smith traces this relationship between American and French film industries back to the era of Lumiere and Pathe Freres. France, and Paris in particular, was something to be consumed, for its food, literature, fashion, and everything else: this idea is central to the plot of Sabrina, and is reflected in much of Hepburn’s career as a “European” star, as argued by Handyside.

Smith also comments on the casting of Bogart, who she claims had an identity of “rugged cowboy American individualism,” as an antithesis to Hepburn’s European sensibilities. In this film, Bogart’s character is the epitome of American economic style, yet by the end, he is inextricably attached to Europe, as both an idea and physically. The author finds many ties between American and European cultural codes referenced in the film, such as how Sabrina needs her Parisian makeover in order to socialize with the higher class of Americans. The film, as mentioned in many other placed, was the first full-scale use of European fashions in an American film; these only emphasize Hepburn’s thin, “hungry” European body, which becomes the clothing that she wears. Smith notes that this film made significant inroads to “incorporate and denationalize” French cultures and its products, something that has continued in American film through the present.