Elegant style icon wardrobe essentials: Sophia Loren in headscarves

When describing Sophia Loren, some use the word "elegant", while most use "sexy". But perhaps the best word to describe a woman like Sophia Loren is "grand". She looks like a living Italian volcano, with everything grand: grand eyes, grand nose, grand mouth, and, of course, a grand figure. Grand, but feminine.

What is grander than her figure is perhaps her personality: when one of the world's most handsome and stylish men, Cary Grant, wanted to marry her, Sophia Loren chose Carlo Ponti, a married Italian man who was shorter and more than 20 years older than her, and never left him; at the peak of her movie career, she stopped working for months and months to stay in bed, so she could become a mother, twice; she called her mother every single day, wherever she was and however busy she was.

On screen, Sophia Loren can play a duchess, but off screen and in her heart, she is a Neapolitan, knowing what she wants and fighting for it, loyal to her family and close to the earth, like all those peasant women she played for Vittorio De Sica.

But when Sophia Loren wears a scarf over her head, she is a star, even in a peasant girl's costume.