Vintage 1950s Pocket Mirror 💄 Audrey Hepburn Pin-Up NOS Made in Japan Dime-Store Collectible

Audrey Hepburn in Your Pocket? 💄 Vintage 1950s Pin-Up Pocket Mirror, Made in Japan, NOS

Size: 2" ~ The mirror backs show a bit of the scattered speckling old mirror glass gets over the decades.

💄 Audrey Hepburn

Her name isn't printed anywhere on it, but that's Audrey Hepburn - the dark upswept hair, the heavy brows, the wide dark eyes and that half-smile are hers, in the look she wore in the late 1950s. She's printed in color on a red ground, in a pale blue-gray top with a dark necklace, inside a round hot-pink plastic rim, and "JAPAN" is stamped in ink right over the picture - not printed - low across her neck and shoulder, a little crooked, the way a hand stamp runs.

🎬 Roman Holiday in Tokyo

Roman Holiday opened at Tokyo's Hibiya theater on April 19, 1954, and ran five weeks there - the film that made her a star in Japan almost overnight. The producer Masaichi Nakata said a few months later that her pictures "had captured Japan," and that Tokyo girls were cutting their hair to match hers; beauty-shop owners in Kyushu are even said to have held a temple ceremony asking forgiveness for the "Audrey Hepburn mania" sweeping their trade. A Japanese novelty maker stamping her face onto a little purse mirror fits that moment exactly - it's her sudden fame in Japan, not the plain JAPAN stamp by itself, that puts this piece at 1954 or after.

💍 A Dime-Store Face

This same red-ground, pink-rimmed design went out with more than one actress's face on it - other leading ladies of the day turn up in the same style and size. These were cheap novelty mirrors, sold at drugstore and five-and-dime counters. Collector lore holds they also turned up as carnival and gumball-machine prizes, passed around as much as they were ever bought.

🏆 1954, Her Year

Roman Holiday had opened in America in 1953, and on March 25, 1954 it won her the Oscar for Best Actress. Japan got the film less than a month later, and that's when the craze took off there. Japanese dictionaries still list the "Hepburn cut," the short Roman Holiday hairdo every young woman in Tokyo seemed to want. Then Sabrina reached Japanese theaters that September, and the slim cropped trousers she wore in it are still called "Sabrina pants" in Japan. In 2001 the director of the Audrey Hepburn museum in Tolochenaz, the Swiss village where she lived, said that from Roman Holiday on she had been Japan's favorite actress.

🗾 That JAPAN Stamp

American customs has asked for a country of origin on imports since 1891. Japanese goods said "Nippon" until 1921, then "Japan" or "Made in Japan"; from 1947 the occupation government had exporters mark "Occupied Japan," and after the occupation ended in 1952 it was plain "Japan" again. So the word alone can't date anything. Her face does that: she wasn't a star until 1953. Mirrors in this same round, plastic-rimmed style turn up with Kim Novak, Deborah Kerr, Maureen O'Hara, Rita Hayworth and Shirley Jones on them too, all stamped JAPAN, a whole line of movie-star mirrors for the drugstore counter.

🪞 A Hard One to Find

I don't see this particular portrait turn up often - it's a hard one to find.