Princess Diana’s Revenge Dress Returns to Sotheby’s With $300,000 Price Tag

It’s been 32 years since Princess Diana stepped out at the Serpentine Gallery’s summer party wearing a black Christina Stambolian dress, otherwise dubbed “the revenge dress.” The dress has served as a reference point for fashion designers on the international runways and for costume designers on shows such as Netflix’s “The Crown.” Now, the dress is coming to auction at Sotheby’s London on December 9 for an estimate of $150,000 to $300,000.

The famous black dress was last offered for sale when the late princess gave 79 of her dresses to a charity auction for cancer and AIDS research. At Sotheby’s London, the dress will be sold with the original catalog from 1997 that was numbered and signed by Princess Diana and crediting Prince William with the idea of the sale. This time around, part of the proceeds from the dress sale will be donated to NHS Lothian Charity on behalf of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital.

The identity of the consignor has not been revealed, but it’s understood to be a Scottish businessman. “My late husband and I knew that this dress was something special. Princess Diana was walking into the worst night of her life and you would never know it to look at her. It went from a cocktail dress to a statement in the time it took to photograph her,” said the wife of the consignor in a statement. “Thirty years on, you can say the words anywhere in the world and everyone knows exactly which dress you mean. Bidding at auction and winning it was one of the great days of our life together. With him gone, that chapter has closed, and so should this one. I hope it goes to someone who will enjoy owning it as much as we did.”

Princess Diana wore the dress in 1994 on the night that her ex-husband, then Prince Charles was giving a televised interview with Jonathan Dimbleby confessing to his affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles. The day after, the dress was on the front page of every newspaper. “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,” said Morgane Halimi, Sotheby’s global head of handbags and fashion in a statement. “On her own terms, Princess Diana turned the dress into one of the most powerful messages she ever made, during one of the most scrutinized and emotionally charged episodes of her life.”

The revenge dress will be on display at Sotheby’s London from September 18 to 24, coinciding with London Fashion Week, before traveling to Hong Kong, Geneva, and New York, where it will be on show at Sotheby’s Breuer Building from December 2. The dress has drawn many comparisons, from Odile the black swan in Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” to John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X (1884). In 2022, Taylor Swift referenced Diana’s revenge dress in her record “Vigilante Shit,” singing, “I don’t dress for women/ I don’t dress for men/ Lately I’ve been dressing for revenge.”