- The last year of Princess Diana’s life was marked by taking fashion risks, including at December 1996’s Met Gala—the first and only Met Diana ever attended.
- In her final days, she wore the “Famous Five” dresses designed by Jacques Azagury.
- The “final goodbye” dress Jacques Azagury was designing at the time of her death would’ve been her most daring look—and came to represent her newfound independence and personal style.
If Princess Diana’s fashion renaissance began with 1994’s revenge dress, it was taken up a notch at her one and only Met Gala appearance in December 1996.
Before the annual event shifted to the first Monday in May (and long before Karlie Kloss ever looked “camp right in the eye”), the Met Ball was more of a fancy fashion fundraiser than the sartorial extravaganza we know and love today. But that doesn’t mean Princess Diana didn’t take some style risks for her appearance. That night, Diana wore a midnight blue, lingerie-inspired silk John Galliano for Dior slip dress with lace negligée trim and matching dressing-gown style robe.Diana, Princess of Wales at the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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As Vogue put it, this stood out as “her most un-royal look to date,” and “signaled that the recent divorcée was enjoying a new phase of her life unshackled from Kensington Palace protocol.” Royal biographer Katie Nicholl wrote in her 2010 book William and Harry that Diana had reservations about the risqué dress—mostly because it might embarrass her eldest son, Prince William, who was 14 at the time and struggling with his parents’ divorce. Ultimately, the desire to make a fashion statement won out.
“That was one of her most shocking dresses,” Eloise Moran, author of The Lady Di Look Book: What Diana Was Trying to Tell Us Through Her Clothes, would later say. “But I thought she looked fabulous. She just looked so happy and confident.”
This was the moment, according to Moran, where Diana went “from royal to international celebrity.” Charles who?Diana wore a Dior slip dress, designed by John Galliano, to event.
No one would have known it at the time, but on that chilly December day in New York City, the Princess of Wales—then just 35 years old—had just eight months to live. She’d turn 36 just two months before a Paris car crash took her life. Just over a year before that awful day—August 31, 1997—Diana and Prince Charles finalized their divorce on August 28, 1996. The clock was ticking, but everyone was unaware. The former couple had separated in 1992, and most of the divorce process was contentious, but by the end of it, Charles and Diana had found a modicum of peace.
In the brief but transformative post-divorce era of her life, Diana embraced her single status, taking on a more daring and personal style in her last year—and not just at the Met Gala. A prime example was her champagne Catherine Walker dress worn on June 23, 1997 to a party in New York City with Jimmy Choo heels.
The designer was Diana’s go-to collaborator throughout her royal life—Diana was buried in a black Catherine Walker dress—and this floral embellished number was a clear standout. Another Catherine—the Princess of Wales—still wears the label up to the present day, often in homage to the mother-in-law she never knew.Princess Diana on June 23, 1997 in New York.
GettyDiana wore a champagne Catherine Walker dress with floral embellishments and Jimmy Choo heels.
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“She certainly knew how to pull a front page.”
By the end of Diana’s far-too-short life, “Charles and Diana’s relationship had mellowed onto a more civilized plain,” royal historian Hugo Vickers told TIME. “I won’t say they had suddenly become bosom friends, but, as is the case with many divorced parents, in time things settle down and it does not get more difficult.”
Former Vanity Fair and The New Yorker editor-in-chief Tina Brown had lunch with Diana and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour in New York City during Diana’s final summer. “At the end of Diana’s life, she and Charles were on the best terms they’d been for a very long time,” Brown later wrote. “Charles got into the habit of dropping in on her at Kensington Palace, and they would have tea and a sort of rueful exchange. They even had some laughs together.”An ice blue Catherine Walker dress worn by Diana in 1997.
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Of Camilla Parker Bowles—whose relationship with Charles caused Diana to deem her marriage “crowded”—Brown wrote that Diana “had accepted Camilla. One thing she had finally done was really understand that Camilla was the love of his life, and there was just nothing she could do about it.”
That said, Brown admitted that Diana was incredibly lonely, and “she would go back to Charles in a heartbeat if he wanted her.”
In July 1997—the same month that Camilla turned 50, and the same month that Charles threw a birthday party for her—royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams told TIME that Charles and Diana’s “competition in public” was out in full force. Charles threw a party; Diana hit back “by showing off her swimwear on her holiday in St. Tropez. She certainly knew how to pull a front page,” he said. Diana spent much of the last days of her life on holiday with a new boyfriend, Dodi Fayed. He would die alongside her in that Paris tunnel.Princess Diana vacationing in St. Tropez on July 17, 1997.
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“Outwardly, she seemed almost deliriously happy,” royal biographer Christopher Andersen said. “Privately things were different. Her longtime lawyer and friend Lord Palumbo told me, ‘Imagine, incredible adulation during the day, then dinner on a tray in front of the television at Kensington Palace—alone.’”
That isolation was part of why she accepted businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed’s invitation to join him in the South of France in July 1997. It was there that Diana was introduced to Dodi, and the two hit it off. “Diana was determined not to be seen as a victim,” Andersen said, adding, “She was looking forward to what she thought would be a bright future. That’s what made her death at the age of 36 so heartbreaking.”Princess Diana pictured on her final birthday, July 1, 1997, wearing Jacques Azagury.
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“She wanted to go super short on the skirts.”
That final summer of 1997 was marked by a lot of swimsuits—but also a lot of Versace (a new favorite), Catherine Walker (an old standby), and Jacques Azagury, who designed Diana’s “Famous Five” dresses. These five looks towards the end of her life (worn from June 1995 to July 1997) pushed the envelope. She was appearing in more daring and sexy looks than ever before—and Diana wanted to go even bolder, he said on Hello!’s “A Right Royal Podcast.”
The only time Diana and Azagury disagreed, he said, was “when she wanted to go super short on the skirts.”Princess Diana wearing one of Jacques Azagury’s “famous five” on June 17, 1997 in Washington, D.C.
“Paul Burrell, her butler, and myself would say, ‘That’s as short as you can go,’” Azagury explained. “Take the blue dress [known later as the Swan Lake dress, referencing the ballet performance she wore it to]. She even wanted to go shorter than that on the dress. And we said, ‘Well, look. There’s not much dress at the top, there’s not much dress at the bottom. You’ll end up with nothing in between.’”
Azagury designed several memorable looks for Diana’s final summer—the aforementioned Swan Lake dress, worn on June 3, 1997; the red Washington dress, worn on June 18, 1997 in Washington, D.C.; and Diana’s final birthday dress, a black number worn on July 1, 1997. The birthday dress would ultimately be Diana’s last red carpet dress before her death almost exactly two months later.
“She was always very excited by fashion, and she knew she would please so many people just waiting for her to come out in the next dress, whether they were waiting in the streets or watching her on the television,” Azagury told People. “She took a long time making sure that everything was just right, choosing the right shoes and jewelry.”
“After the breakup of the marriage, she rediscovered herself and she turned into this unbelievably stunning woman—not that she wasn’t before, but that’s when her personality really started to shine,” he added. “She had everything—the most amazing legs, that great hair, those blue eyes.”Princess Diana attends a performance of ‘Swan Lake’ by the English National Ballet on June 3, 1997.
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At the time of the Princess of Wales’s death, Azagury was designing what would’ve been her most statement-making look yet. It was meant be worn to a Disney premiere in September, the designer told Vogue. And when Azagury last saw Diana before her trip to Paris, she was “the best and happiest I had ever seen her.”
The design would become known as Diana’s “goodbye dress.” According to Azagury, the garment “was really stunning on her,” he said. “It was cut very, very low at the front—more daring. This was going to be the dress that sort of outed all the other dresses. And she looked absolutely amazing.”
Though never worn, the design represents Diana’s bold approach to fashion and growing self-assurance.
“She’s found herself.”
“Shy Di” no more, Diana had blossomed post-divorce into a woman with “confidence in what was coming in her life,” Azagury said. “And it’s a distinct difference to the earlier years in posture, in look, in confidence—everything is quite an extreme change.” The Famous Five dresses, he said, “were just reflecting her confidence in the woman that she had become.”
Gone were the days of adhering to the royal dress code—which Diana sometimes eschewed even when she was a working royal. “Whatever I wear, I’ll be criticized, so let’s go for it,” she told French designer Roland Klein when demanding he shorten the hem of her skirt, Vanity Fair reported.Princess Diana wears a Jacques Azagury dress in one of her final public appearances.
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When someone dies at 36 years old, there’s little comfort to be found. If any can be, however, it’s this: Diana felt freedom in her final days. One of her favorite designers, Gianni Versace—who was tragically murdered about six weeks before Diana’s own death—said in the July 1997 issue of Vanity Fair, “I had a fitting with her last week for new suits and clothing for spring, and she is so serene. It is a moment in her life, I think, when she’s found herself—the way she wants to live.”
It’s forever bittersweet that Diana had finally found herself, just before the world tragically lost her.
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