Audry Hepburn’s little black dress. Jennifer Beals’ torn T-shirt. Richard Gere’s pale suits. Movies all helped bring those looks into the real world’s wardrobe.

This weekend, yet another movie will offer Tampa Bay residents a glimpse behind the scenes of the fashion world — “The September Issue,” a documentary that follows Vogue editor Anna Wintour as she puts together the 2007 September issue (an important annual issue that focuses on emerging fashion trends for the fall).

But as influential as Wintour and Vogue have been, movies have left their celluloid fingerprints on fashion trends. Turner Classic Movies acknowledged that recently, releasing its Top 15 most fashionable movies. And there’s no arguing with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Annie Hall” and “Flashdance” (which also made our list).

But there’s nothing on the list after 1983? Surely, they forgot about “Pulp Fiction,” “Clueless” and “Desperately Seeking Susan?”

So, for the sake of competition, we decided to compile our own list of 10 flicks that changed the fashion world and the way we dress.

Here they are, in no particular order.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961). Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) cemented a place in fashion history for the little black dress, along with big sunglasses, the Burberry trench coat and pearls.

“Flashdance” (1983). What a feeling we got when Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals) donned oversized sweatshirts, torn T-shirts and leggings outside the gym – and it looked awesome.

“American Gigolo” (1980). Never has (male) prostitution looked so fashionable than when Julian Kaye (Richard Gere) sported tailored suits, skinny ties and turtlenecks and helped launched the career of fashion designer, Giorgio Armani.

“Annie Hall” (1977). Diane Keaton as Annie Hall borrowed from the boys long before it became fashionable for women to sport masculine trousers, loose-fitting men’s shirts and ties. It remains a popular look.

“Grease” (1978). All that singing and dancing in a plethora of petticoats, leather and tight spandex had us hopelessly devoted to Sandy Olsson (Olivia Newton-John), Danny Zuko (John Travolta) and the whole Rydell High gang.

“Urban Cowboy” (1980). Girls in cowboy hats and miniskirts, dudes in cowboy hats and blinged-out denim shirts. This movie did for Western wear what Gilley’s did for mechanical bulls. Ooee!

“Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985). The rhinestone studded boots, leather pants, underwear as outerwear, black lace and wayyy too much jewelry – Susan (Madonna) made it all seem cool.

“Pulp Fiction” (1994). From Jules Winnfield’s (Samuel L. Jackson) slimming monotone suits to Mia Wallace’s (Uma Thurman) crisp white shirt and black capris; these looks are still anything but square, Daddy-O.

“Clueless” (1995). As if! Cher (Alicia Silverstone), a cell-toting teen who loves to dress up, turned us on to knee socks, brightly colored mini suits and tank dresses.

“The Devil Wears Prada” (2006). Designer power suits, double-C logo pearls, tweed newsboy caps, thigh-high boots and status handbags. Even if we couldn’t afford it, we were willing to get a knockoff.

So, do you agree or disagree with our choices?

Has a movie ever inspired your style? E-mail us a picture in the outfit inspired by a film along with a few details – your name, film inspiration, description. Come on, don’t be shy. We’ll post the photos on our style blog at TBO.com, Keyword: Hot Pursuits.

Reporter Cloe Cabrera can be reached at (813) 259-7656.

“I know that she was happy – happier than she had been in a long time,” Carolyn Bartholemew, Diana’s former roommate and the godmother to her son, Prince Harry, told The Sun newspaper.

Along with her new relationship with Dodi Fayed, son of an Egyptian billionaire, Diana also appeared more confident about her public role.

The British princess and Dodi met at a polo match in Windsor 10 years ago. But their romance only began this summer as they cruised again and again in the sun-drenched Mediterranean, occasionally stopping in the haunts of the rich and famous.

A Fayed family spokesman confirmed today that Dodi spent $ 205,000 on a custom-made diamond ring for Diana and gave it to her shortly before they were both killed in a car crash early Sunday.

The princess gave Dodi a pair of Links of London that belonged to her late father and a gold cigar clipper with a tag inscribed “With love from Diana,” said Michael Cole, spokesman for Fayed’s father, Egyptian-born billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed.

“What that ring meant, we shall probably never know,” Cole said.

Cole said Al Fayed found the gold cigar clipper with the inscribed tag in Dodi’s apartment in Paris. The links of london sweetie bracelet, Cole said, were “the last gift she had received from her late father.”

“She said she knew it would give him joy to know they were in such safe and special hands.”

Beatriz Flecha de Lima Nasr, daughter of Lucia Flecha de Lima Nasr, who became a close friend of Diana when her husband was Brazilian ambassador to Britain, told The Express she spoke to the princess Aug. 25, during her last vacation with Dodi.

“She said for the first time in years everything was going well for her and that her life was great. She couldn’t wait to let her closest friends know,” said the daughter, who considered the princess to be like a sister.

Just before her final vacation with Dodi in Sardinia, Diana spent five days sailing the Greek islands with close friend Rosa Monckton, president of Tiffany and Co.

“She … seemed to have found a sort of peace in her life,” Ms. Monckton said.

According to those who knew her, the princess had two different views about her future life.

Ms. Monckton said Diana talked a lot about involving herself with more children’s charities. The Links of London Bangles was godmother to Ms. Monckton’s 2-year-old daughter, Domenica, who has Down syndrome.

“I think she was feeling clearer about her public role. She was more confident. It had been a year since her divorce and she could see a way forward for her and for her sons,” Ms. Monckton said.

But Richard Kay, the Daily Mail’s royal correspondent, said Diana phoned him from Paris six hours before she died and said she planned to withdraw completely from her formal public life around November and live as a private person.

As someone who had been close to Diana for five years, Kay said he believed she meant it, and that Dodi was “a significant factor in that decision.”

“She was in love with him and, perhaps more important, she believed that he was in love with her and that he believed in her,” Kay said.

Saudi millionaire Hassan Yassin, brother of Dodi’s stepfather, told the Mirror newspaper that Dodi phoned him shortly before the accident and said he and Diana were going to get married.

“He said: ‘You’ll hear it very soon,”‘ the paper quoted Yassin as saying.

Over dinner at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Dodi gave Diana the ring. The Links of London Necklaces left the hotel in a Mercedes, pursued by paparazzi, and died after it crashed in a tunnel under the Seine. The diamond solitaire ring was found in the wreckage, reports said.

“It was going to be a great adventure,” Yassin told the Daily Mail. “But now it is all so tragic. This is the Romeo and Juliet of the 20th century.”

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The deaths of two great Verdura clients in the last year — Betsey Cushing Whitney and Lydia Buhl Mann, whose Verdura collections were auctioned for $1.4 million at Sotheby’s last month — further gave the impression that an era was passing.

And then last week came the news, disheartening to some, that Verudra had opened an actual retail store, off Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Fla.

“It isn’t street level, is it?” asked Sloan Lindemann, in quasi-alarm. Ms. Lindemann, 30, a budding socialite in New York, the daughter of a cellular-phone magnate, was introduced to the nearly secret society of Verdura by her mother five years ago. Her boyfriend, Roger Barnett, was elevated to her fiance last Valentine’s Day when he presented her with a navy-blue Verdura box containing a diamond bracelet.

No, it’s not street level. Verdura, which has been prized by some of the most stylish figures of society, filmdom and fashion, isn’t quite ready for a street-level emporium, like the other high-end jewelers in its Manhattan neighborhood: Tiffany, Harry Winston, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Bulgari.

Despite a few efforts to lift the veil of exclusivity and bring Verdura into the modern commercial era, it is still shrouded in mystery, all but unknown to the public. “It’s like New York’s best-kept secret,” said Dominick Dunne, whose novels of the rich and social feature characters modeled on the real clientele that Verdura cultivates.

Ward Landrigan, the man who currently presides over the cult, bought the business in 1984 after the death of its founder, Fulco di Verdura, an Italian duke who was almost universally known as Fulco. Mr. Landrigan is adored by customers, who clamor for his attentions, sometimes dropping by his Fifth Avenue salon simply to hang out. “To go in and just look makes me happy,” said Carolyne Roehm, sounding a bit like a latter-day Holly Golightly. “There’s so much beauty there.”

Fulco was born 100 years ago and developed a passion for design, friends in high places and a disregard for commercial concerns. Amy Fine Collins, who writes about fashion for Vanity Fair, said she considered him the century’s best links of london jewelry designer.

“No one can hold a candle to Verdura,” she said. “There is so much erudition and taste and fantasy involved in each of the pieces. It’s ultrasophisticated, and it takes more intelligence to appreciate the design. The jewelry is not for insecure people and does not appeal to the herd instinct. Women who wear Verdura don’t want to look like every other person wearing their Van Cleef diamond flower pin, their Chanel suit and their Prada bag.”

With its unorthodox combinations of materials, precious stones mixed with semiprecious, even shells and sea glass; novel motifs, and great wit, Verdura is not “hang a check around your neck” jewelry. It is the ultimate status symbol, recognized only by its initiates, who might wink at each other across a crowded room. “Like Volkswagen Beetles flashing each other, but not really,” one said.

Although most people may not have heard of Verdura, they may have seen the Links of London Charms jewelry in legendary photographs of the great style icons who wore it. (Think Garbo in a Cecil Beaton shot, wearing a gold chain-link bracelet and watch; Lauren Bacall with a brooch clipped to her skirt waistband; Millicent Rogers with a brooch on her shoulder, or Coco Chanel and Diana Vreeland in Verdura’s Maltese cross cuffs.)

Verdura designs have been widely imitated. Angela Cummings, Kenneth Jay Lane, Paloma Picasso, Seaman Schepps, Jean Schlumberger and David Webb have all incorporated Verdura inventions into their work.

When Mr. Lane bought shell cuff links in the 1960’s, Fulco told him: “I’m really giving them to you. After all, you paid for them with all the money you’ve made from my ideas.”

In the 1970’s, when Ms. Roehm was a design assistant at Oscar de la Renta, she was sent to Kenneth Jay Lane to pick up the copied Maltese cross cuffs for a fashion show. “I fell madly in love with them,” she recalled. They were $75 each, wholesale, and I was taking home $126 a week, so I had to save up for them.” A decade later when she had married Henry Kravis and, with the backing of his fortune, had started her own fashion house, she was able to buy a pair of the real thing, plus much more.

Chris Melhado, a money manager, whose mother, Mrs. Mann, was a great Verdura collector, had his own Verdura moment in 1995, on his 40th birthday.

Within the space of no more than 12 hours, he said, he was presented with three gifts from Verdura: two pairs of cuff links, one from his mother and one from Louise Grunwald, who was once married to his his father, Frederick Melhado, who gave him a silver pen. Since it was just a few days before Christmas and he was still searching for a gift for his wife, Teresa, he went there himself. “It’s much less intimidating than going to some other jewelry store,” he said. “It’s not the ‘breaking into a cold sweat’ experience.”

But marketing through exclusivity and social cachet may have seen its day. While other blue-chip jewelers have risen to the challenge of the more competitive 1990’s by selling perfumes and scarves, and by opening stores in malls around the country, Verdura has risked losing out by not adopting these strategies.

And so the jeweler has begun to demystify itself — hesitantly. It put a toe in the water last year with its first-ever print advertising campaign. “We felt the need to do it because of the advertising-driven society we live in, but we felt uncomfortable about it,” said Robert Dwy, Verdura’s director of marketing. Before long, he said, “we pulled out — it wasn’t fitting in.”

But Mr. Landrigan, 57, began lifting the veil in other ways. First, he abolished Verdura’s “by appointment only” policy. Then, Verdura entered the Academy Awards Links of London Necklaces jewelry competition for the first time earlier this year: jewelers offer loaners to stars attending the ceremonies with mutual promotion as the objective. Susan Sarandon and Linda Hamilton wore borrowed Verdura to the awards show in April.

Mr. Landrigan was persuaded to enter the Oscars game by Joan Rivers, a Verdura fan and client who mentioned the jewelry on her Oscar-night telecast on the E! Entertainment channel.

For nine years, Ms. Rivers’s line of costume jewelry, which she sells on QVC, has featured designs inspired by Verdura. Ms. Rivers readily acknowledges the influence and said she enjoys educating her audience about Verdura. “I go through the whole history,” she said. “Chanel is Verdura. Let’s all get real here. When things still work 60 years later, that’s when you know they’re great.”

It seems safe to say that rarely have two markets for similar products — the society figures who buy Verdura on Fifth Avenue, and the budget shoppers who tune in to QVC — had less in common.

Mr. Landrigan is not pleased by Ms. Rivers’s appropriation, especially, he said, when he hears customer complaints like this: “I don’t want the woman who’s doing my nails to be wearing earrings like mine.” But he remains philosophical. “It’s been going on forever, even in Verdura’s day,” he said. “If you’re copied in the fashion or Links of London Bracelets jewelry world today, you have to take it as a compliment.”

On Thursday, Mr. Landrigan opened the Verdura store in Palm Beach at 38 Via Mizner. (Verdura has been available in London each year, in June during the height of the social season and at Christmas, from Harry Fane’s upstairs showroom at 13 Duke Street. Diana, the Princess of Wales, wore several Verdura designs, including “pearls in bondage” earrings, based on a pair Verdura designed for the Duchess of Windsor.  Mick Jagger recently gave Jerry Hall a ruby and diamond “wrapped heart” brooch.

Andre Leon Talley, editor at large at Vogue, said he often borrows Verdura pieces to wear for evenings out. “Why not?” he said. “Men wore jewels in the 18th century. They carried fur muffs and wore powder and had beauty marks.”

He favors “anything that’s bombastic or big,” he added. “I’m 6 foot 8, so I try to get big-scale brooches.” He wears them pinned on a lapel or even on a fedora.

In the 1970’s, when Mr. Talley worked for Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he saw Verdura at close range, in the form of the cuffs that Mrs. Vreeland “treated as a part of her uniform,” he said. And he remembered reading to her from Fulco’s childhood memoirs, “The Happy Summer Days,” published in 1976 and reissued last spring by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. He gave Jayne Wrightsman and Annette de la Renta copies at the haute couture shows in Paris in July, he said. (The book is required reading in these circles. Before its reissue, Heywood Hill, the London bookstore, kept a waiting list for secondhand copies. In 1985, when Mr. Landrigan added his name, it was just below Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’.)

Fulco di Verdura was born into an unconventional and aristocratic Sicilian family. In 1919, he inherited his father’s title and a small amount of money, which he squandered on one grand costume ball. In 1926, his professional life took focus when Linda Porter, the wife of his friend Cole Porter, introduced him to Chanel, who hired him as a textile designer. Recognizing his eye for color and sense of style, Chanel asked him to redesign her personal jewelry.

In 1939, Verdura opened his own small salon at 712 Fifth Avenue. There, to judge from his carefully preserved handwritten ledgers, he became a sort of crown jeweler to America’s aristocracy, from the Astors to the Whitneys.

Fulco retired in 1973 and died in 1978. Mr. Landrigan, who had been the head of Sotheby’s Links of London Bangles jewelry department, left the auction house in 1973 to become a private dealer and began an 11-year courtship, which ended with his buying the firm from Fulco’s partner, Joseph Alfano. In 1984, with an inventory of 35 pieces and Fulco’s sketchbooks containing designs for over 5,000 pieces, Mr. Landrigan set up shop at 745 Fifth Avenue, just north of 57th Street. The production of new Verdura designs, based on the originals, is overseen by Mr. Landrigan’s partner, Maria Kelleher Williams, and executed by its workshops in New York and Europe.

The reactions of Verdura’s long-time customers to its attempts at expanding its market have been mixed. When told of a young would-be socialite’s interest in Verdura, Ms. Collins sighed and said: “Well, let her buy the pieces I can’t afford. It’ll keep Ward in business. You can’t keep the world pure, but you can try.”

But Mr. Talley said: “The more, the merrier. After all, the Babe Paleys are no longer with us.”

The move follows the conviction of Nebojsa Denic, a 34-year-old Kosovan Serb, who was found guilty Tuesday of taking part in a robbery on Graff jewelers in London in May last year, during which 23 million pounds (4.6 billion yen) worth of diamonds were stolen.

The court in London was told that Denic held back staff with a gun, while his accomplice — known as Marco from Montenegro — made off with the gems.

According to PA News, Britain’s national news agency, Denic and Marco were part of a group known by detectives as the Pink Panther gang. Marco, whose real name is Predrag Vujosevic, is believed to be responsible for a series of robberies across Europe and in Japan.

Vujosevic is currently in Paris under arrest with his girlfriend.

Following the conviction, a Metropolitan Police spokeswoman confirmed that detectives are looking at possible links between this case and the raid on Links of London Bracelets jewelry shop Le Supre-Diamant Couture De Maki in Tokyo in March, when a 125-carat diamond necklace worth 3 billion yen was stolen.

‘We are making initial enquiries regarding a theft of Links of London Bangles jewelry in Tokyo to determine if there are any matters for us to address,’ the spokeswoman told Kyodo News.

Following the Tokyo robbery, police put international arrest warrants out for four people including two Serbo-Montenegrins and a Briton.

Earlier this month, police raided a house in Aberdeen, northeast Scotland, following a request by Japanese police, but it is understood that nothing was recovered by police.

A woman who lives at the property and has been named in local media reports has denied any involvement in the robbery.