Princess Diana’s purple velvet dress sold for $604,800 at auction

In early 1997, the Princess Diana she decided to make room in her closet. Reportedly, in accordance with the prince william, decided to auction off 79 cocktail and evening dresses worn during her tenure as Princess of Wales, the proceeds of which would benefit the AIDS Crisis Trust and the Royal Marsden Hospital, of which she was president for eight years.

One of the dresses auctioned that day, a strapless dress in regal purple velvet designed by the couturier Victor Edelstein, it was a favorite of Diana in the early nineties. Her dress also earned her a series of formal portraits, one of which still hangs in the entrance hall of the Royal Marsden. After selling for $24,150 in 1997, the dress has been auctioned by Sotheby’s on Friday as part of the sale The One, which has put up for sale iconic objects from the history of mankind. The dress was awarded for $604,800far beyond the estimate of $80,000-120,000 indicated by the auction house before the sale.

Second Cynthia Houlton, senior vice president and global head of fashion and accessories at Sotheby’s, the dress represents the fashion of the late 1980s when it was designed and the timeless qualities Diana sought in her wardrobe: “When you think of these very formal, they keep coming back,” he said. “This dress, in some respects, is very similar to those that would have been worn 100 years ago, and there is a version of this dress that is exactly the same today.” She cited the renewed enthusiasm for velvet on the runway, along with recent Alexander McQueen collections, as an example of how the look is still relevant today.

Edelstein, a London-born designer who trained at Dior’s London branch before launching his own line in 1977, began dressing Diana during her time in the royal family, including her pregnancy with William. He became famous for dressing the women of the British establishment in looks that mixed society customs with modern flair and, in 1988, the journalist Nicholas Coleridge he stated that he had emerged as “the master of the English thoroughbred look”.

Edelstein’s creations for Diana departed from some of his more traditional works, in part because the pair had formed an emotional and intimate bond. Edelstein told Colin McDowell who tended not to put pressure on Diana with her tastes, even if hers were very different: “She was so pushy in the palace that I felt I wouldn’t put pressure on her too,” Edelstein said.

Although he custom designed many dresses for Diana, including the iconic midnight blue dress she wore to dance with John Travolta while visiting the White House in 1985, the purple velvet dress is from her Fall 1989 collection. According to the Sunday Timesthe collection was presented in July 1989 in a room where customers “sat in slender gold chairs under the opulent chandeliers of mirrored salons that are just as you’d imagine.”

In the summer of 1991, Diana wore the dress for her tenth official portrait, painted by Douglas Anderson. The painter later told a Sally Bedell Smith that it was difficult for him to avoid capturing her “horrible sadness” during the five sessions: “He was on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” he said. When Harpers & Queen unveiled the painting in the May 1992 issue, the writer Vicky Woods she was pleased with the gown and the cabochon amethysts set in diamonds, but unimpressed by the resemblance. Perhaps sensing her sadness, she wrote: ‘What’s wrong between [Diana] and the finished canvas?» In retrospect, it’s not hard to guess who his relationship problems with back then Prince Charles they may have weighed them during the session; and in fact the two would announce their separation in December 1992.

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In 2001, Edelstein told the reporter Sarah Bradford that he understood Diana’s personal struggles when he dressed her in the 80s. “The essential basis of that tragedy was that she was in love with him when she married him,” Edelstein noted. When she moved away from Carlo, she began to express her autonomy through clothing: «she started to become glamorous when her marriage started to go badly».

When she decided to sell her wardrobe in early 1997, she had taken a new approach to dressing, incorporating more European designers and taking far fewer occasions to wear spectacular ball gowns. But she still spent one more day playing dress up in the old clothes. With the photographer Mario Testino and the writer Cathy Horyn, Diana posed for the cover of Vanity Fair of July 1997 , where she revisited some of the dresses she loved, including the purple velvet Edelstein.

“One look at these photographs tells the story. The looks he throws at Mario are so warm and confidential that they might be his most revealing statements about him since his divorce,” wrote Horyn, in an article titled Diana Reborn. “And considering she’d never posed for Mario before—she didn’t know the man until she walked through the door—she Diana she must have felt extraordinarily free to express herself as openly as she did.”

The 1997 auction, two months before his tragic death at the age of 36, raised a total of $3.25 million. In the decades since, the legend of him has only grown. The fact that the dress sold for 25 times its 1997 price is just proof that its legacy is exceeding anyone’s expectations.

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