Add Page Six on Google 4 Princess Diana shocked the world when she wore a slinky Christina Stambolian minidress to a Vanity Fair party in 1994. WireImage It’s the most famous LBD in the world.
Princess Diana’s iconic “revenge dress” is hitting the auction block for the second time since the late Princess of Wales wore it to a Vanity Fair party in June 1994.
It’ll be a standalone offering at Sotheby’s in New York on December 9, with estimates landing between $150,000 and $300,000, per the auction house’s site.
The silk Christina Stambolian design features an off-the-shoulder sweetheart neckline and body-hugging draped skirt with a mini train.
The royal punctuated her jaw-dropping look with a pearl necklace, red nail polish, black tights and a confident attitude just hours after a documentary aired in which her estranged husband, then-Prince Charles, admitted to his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.
“It was one of the first Serpentine dinners we did together. None of us had any idea that Charles was going public about the problems in their marriage,” former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief and “When the Going Was Good” author Graydon Carter told Page Six Style of the major moment.
“So, when Diana arrived, we thought she just looked incredibly beautiful. We only discovered that she was wearing a ‘revenge dress’ when we read the papers the next day. As my old Spy magazine colleague Walter Monheit might have said: ‘Revenge may be best served cold—but this one was served hot!'”
Diana and Charles had been separated since December 1992 — and she actually commissioned the custom look before the demise of their relationship, saving it in her closet for three years before deciding at the last minute to wear it to the Serpentine Gallery.
Years later, the designer recalled being asked to craft something “very special” — and the moment marked a defining moment not only in the evolution of Diana’s fashion sense, but also in popular culture.
The princess rarely wore black, as royals often reserve the color only for mourning, and she had rarely before been seen in cocktail styles that hit above the knee.
Even Diana’s accessories told a story: Her pearl-and-sapphire choker was crafted from a brooch gifted by the Queen Mother as a wedding present. She also wore the Collingwood pearl-drop earrings given to her as an engagement present, along with a diamond-and-sapphire bracelet that matched her iconic engagement ring.
The dress was previously sold at auction in July 1997 for £39,098 (nearly $53,00), though we’d expect the hammer to come down at even more than the six-figure estimates this time around.
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