I Went to See Princess Diana’s “Revenge Dress.” It Unearthed Something in Me.

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When people picture the late Lady Diana, she is probably wearing one of two outfits in their minds. The first is the sports-day look : high white socks, an effortlessly slouchy sweatshirt, running shoes. The second is a little black dress. In 1994, on the same day her sometime husband, now King Charles, was due to appear on television and admit that he had been having an affair during their marriage, Diana attended a fundraising dinner at London’s Serpentine Gallery. As the story goes, she changed her mind about what to wear at the last minute, and arrived at the event looking so good it went down in history. The black sheep in her black dress, looking impossibly glamorous in an outfit that the royal family would never have allowed her to wear. A photograph taken of her arriving at the event, having just stepped out of a Jaguar, became an instantly iconic image. The off-shoulder silk gown, made by Greek designer Christina Stambolian, became known as the “revenge dress.”

The picture of Diana in that dress lives in the mind of everyone in Britain, and many more people around the world besides. But the dress itself has been out of sight for almost 30 years. Diana herself auctioned it off in 1997 for cancer and AIDS charities, along with 78 other gowns in her possession, just two months before her death. It sold for 39,098 pounds to a couple in Glasgow, who have owned it, and kept it out of the public eye, ever since. Until now. Sotheby’s announced last week that the dress will go up for auction at the end of this year. Before that, though, it would go on public display, first in London, then in Hong Kong and Geneva, and finally in New York, where the auction will take place in December. It’s listed at an estimated $150,000 to $300,000, some of which will be donated to National Health Service charities, but it’s expected to go for much, much more. To put it in context, a red sweater featuring several sheep, one of them black, that Diana wore to a polo match in the ’80s—another candidate for the outfit that a Diana of the imagination is wearing—sold for $1.1 million in 2023.

The gown is in London this week, and so on Saturday afternoon I went to get a look at one of the most famous dresses in the world. I thought it might just be a lark, a way to while away a slow weekend, another reason to get mad at the British press. I ended up having another reaction entirely.

For an exhibit that exists in front of a tabloid photo, it’s an oddly reverent affair. People talked in whispers, almost as if the sight of the dress abstracted from a body conjured the spirit of Diana herself to the room. “How tall was she?” someone murmured, to which someone else replied “5-foot-10 in flats” without missing a beat. I found it almost funny, so somber and respectful was the atmosphere around what was ultimately just some cloth on a stick.

“It made me more emotional than I thought it was going to,” said Maddie, a 26-year-old upholsterer visiting that afternoon.