Dressing for Revenge: Princess Diana, Taylor Swift and Julia Fox
LONDON — Diana, Princess of Wales’ black Christina Stamboulian dress dubbed “the revenge dress” launched a thousand attacks on then-Prince Charles in 1994.
Her dress lives on, still, even 28 years after Diana wore it to the Serpentine Gallery’s summer party, which she decided to attend at the last minute.
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A picture of Diana wearing the dress was printed on the front page of almost every international newspaper the next day, overtaking coverage of Prince Charles’ televised interview with Jonathan Dimbleby during which he publicly confessed to his affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles.
— . (@cravemedia_) November 5, 2021
Now the famous black chiffon dress is getting a much-anticipated onscreen treatment on season five of Netflix’s “The Crown” premiering on Wednesday, with Elizabeth Debicki playing the role of the late princess.
“Her most important outfit is certainly her revenge dress. It stood for so much then, and now, and in many ways was the antithesis of her wedding dress,” said Eloise Moran, author of “The Lady Di Look Book: What Diana Was Trying to Tell Us Through Her Clothes” and curator of the Instagram account @ladydirevengelooks.
“The black chiffon mini train stood in great contrast to the 25-foot-long train of her wedding gown, signifying the end of her marriage and her liberation. I like to think of it as her divorce dress,” added Moran.
Diana wore the LBD with a triple-strand pearl choker, featuring a large oval sapphire surrounded by diamonds that belonged to Queen Mary, which the princess decided to reimagine into a necklace.
The choker made its debut in 1985 on a state visit to the White House, on the night Diana danced with John Travolta in a long, navy blue velvet dress designed by Victor Edelstein. She wore it again to a concert at Albert Hall in London in 1991 and to the Met Gala in New York in 1996, where the theme was dedicated to Christian Dior and John Galliano had designed a navy slipdress from Dior for the princess.
“The Travolta dress really foreshadows the revenge dress, which is often cited as her most important outfit, but I think she perhaps wouldn’t have worn that revenge dress without having had that Victor Edelstein dress before. It’s incredible the power that came with her wearing a dress rather than a dress wearing her,” said Bethan Holt, author of “The Queen: 70 years of Majestic Style” and “The Duchess of Cambridge: A Decade of Modern Royal Style.”
“The revenge dress was pressure,” said Debicki in British Vogue’s November issue, explaining that Diana had kept the dress in her wardrobe for two or three years before deciding to wear it.
“It was super risqué at the time. She was claiming the space. The way she walked out of that car, the luminosity, the strength of her as that car door opened, she was so fast and so forward. It’s an extraordinary thing to watch. To decide what you’re saying about yourself through fashion…it was a currency. An incredibly powerful currency,” Debicki said.
Diana’s most controversial looks have often been in black, as it’s royal etiquette to only wear the dark hue for mourning.
On her first public engagement with Prince Charles in 1981, the then Diana Spenser wore a strapless taffeta dress by David and Elizabeth Emanuel to a fundraising concert and reception at the Royal Opera House.
The dress went on auction in 2010 by Kerry Taylor Auctions in London, fetching 192,000 pounds. It was collected by Fundación Museo de la Moda, a fashion museum in Chile.
But versions of the ‘revenge dress’ continue to appear like karma — what goes around, comes around.
In 2022, similar styles with similar messages have already made two stops before Debicki’s debut, from Julia Fox opening LaQuan Smith’s fall 2022 show in a long black dress with cutouts at the cleavage fresh from her breakup with Kanye West, to Taylor Swift singing, “I don’t dress for women/ I don’t dress for men/ Lately I’ve been dressing for revenge,” on the song “Vigilante Sh—t” from her new album “Midnights (3am Edition).”
Anyone that uses the tool of fashion to send a message is revenge dressing, and that’s what Diana was doing with her dress, speaking with her clothes rather than saying it out loud.
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