Why Princess Grace Kelly, Caroline, Alexandra Have Worn the Same Dior Suit

LONDON — When your grandmother is Grace Kelly, hand-me-downs are hardly frumpy.

Princess Alexandra of Hanover drove that point home this week at Monaco’s National Day. She wore a chic ensemble that once belonged to Kelly, a brown Dior satin skirt suit at Monaco’s National Day.

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First worn by Princess Grace of Monaco in the early 1960s, Alexandra’s mother, Princess Caroline, also wore the outfit to Monaco’s 1993 National Day celebrations.

Unlike her grandmother and mother, who paired the outfit with hats, the young princess kept accessories to a minimum, wearing dangling earrings and a patterned handbag with the look.

From silver screen star to Monegasque royalty, Kelly is a real-life Cinderella story — and her wardrobe continues to captivate the public.

Doyle’s Nov. 14 auction of Kelly’s personal letters sold for $165,000, more than double the pre-auction estimate of $60,000 to $80,000.

Her wedding dress alone has lived on in iterations worn by Kate Middleton, Paris Hilton, Kitty Spencer, Jasmine Tookes and Miranda Kerr, to name a handful.

While the wedding dress wasn’t Dior, the French label was a staple in Kelly’s covetable closet.

Following her 1956 marriage to Prince Rainier III, the Hollywood actress appeared in a Dior gown at her engagement ball, and chose the “Colinette,” a haute couture creation from Christian Dior’s fall 1956 collection, to wear in her first official portrait as Princesse Grace of Monaco.

Kelly’s love of Dior was memorialized in a 2019 exhibition at the Christian Dior Museum titled “Grace of Monaco, Princess in Dior.”

“Grace Kelly’s relationship with the maison Dior reveals the central place the house occupied in fashion at the time,” said fashion historian Florence Müller, who curated the exhibition.

To prepare the displays, Müller was allowed into the Monaco Palace’s archives to discover the hundreds of dresses belonging to Princess Grace: one-third of them were from Christian Dior.

Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly Through the Years: From American Actress to Royalty

Launch Gallery: Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly Through the Years: From American Actress to Royalty

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