Hepburn Still Wears the Pants

She dances, she cavorts, she wears skinny black leggings. Audrey Hepburn has been reincarnated as the latest muse for Gap, brought back to life to help sell one of the beleaguered clothing chain's staple products - skinny black pants.

An advert featuring Hepburn, which made its television debut this month and can be seen on billboards across America, doctors a scene from the 1957 Stanley Donen film, Funny Face. Hepburn plays a clerk who is discovered by a photographer and taken to Paris, where she becomes the toast of the fashion world. The advert opens with a scene showing Hepburn dancing through a cafe in a black turtleneck top and those pants. The tagline reads: "It's back - the skinny black pant."

But not everyone is enamoured with this latest instance of a large corporation using a dead celebrity to sell a product. "The Gap should be ashamed," wrote one contributor to the ThirdWay advertising blog. "It's a desperate attempt, by a desperate company, to align itself with someone classy."

Gap was unrepentant, saying it had worked with Hepburn's son, Sean Ferrer, and renamed the trousers The Audrey Hepburn™ Pant. It also pledged to make "a generous contribution" to the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund. A Gap marketing executive, Kyle Andrew, told the Los Angeles Times that any advert that attracted attention was a success.

Hepburn, who died of cancer in 1993, is attracting attention for more than her skinny black pants, however. The little black dress she wore in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's goes to auction in London in December, and is expected to fetch more than £50,000.