Diana’s revenge dress up for auction

The so-called revenge dress worn by Diana, Princess of Wales, is going up for auction with Sotheby’s.

Diana wore the dress on 29 June 1994 at a Vanity Fair fundraising dinner at the Serpentine Gallery. Christina Stambolian designed the figure-hugging, strapless black silk evening dress. It is known as the revenge dress because it was leaked that the then-Prince of Wales would admit on national television that he had been unfaithful to her. By then, they had been separated for two years.

The dress is estimated at $150,000–300,000 (£110,000-220,000) and will be offered at auction in December during Sotheby’s Luxury Week. It will be the first time it goes up for auction since June 1997, when the Princess sold dozens of her dresses for charity. Part of the proceeds will be donated to NHS Lothian Charity on behalf of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital.

Before the auction in December, the dress will embark on a global tour, making its debut at London Fashion Week, which runs from 18 September to 24 December. The dress will then head to Hong Kong and Geneva before ending in New York for the auction. It will be a public display from 2 December until the sale on 9 December.

Morgana Halimi, Sotheby’s Global Head of Handbags and Fashion, said, “Fashion can be a language when words fail or are simply not enough. Princess Diana understood that instinctively. What makes this dress extraordinary is not merely that it was worn by the princess, nor that its appearance at the Serpentine event made headlines around the world. It is what it communicated. On her own terms, Princess Diana turned the dress into one of the most powerful messages she ever made, during one of the most scrutinised and emotionally charged episodes of her life. What became a global viral moment – long before social media made the term mundane – also gave license to anyone, but especially women, to use fashion beyond adornment and much more intentionally and meaningfully: as a shield, a weapon or both. What has endured across the decades is not the scandal surrounding that evening, but Princess Diana’s show of confidence and self-possession. She walked into a moment in which so much of her story was being told for her and, through what she chose to wear, reclaimed the narrative for herself.”