US museum buys collection of Princess Diana’s dresses from fashion designer Jacques Azagury for an estimated £100,000 after reading about them on MailOnline
When couturier Jacques Azagury decided to auction his collection of Princess Diana memorabilia, including “twin” versions of some of her most iconic dresses, he expected the auction house to be packed with frenzied bidders.
But just 24 hours after the Ny Breaking revealed that the designer was selling the dresses, along with Christmas cards and letters from the princess, patterns of the dresses and a toile, which had been kept in a safe for 26 years, he was offered a quick sale.
Collector Renae Plant, who runs a 3D interactive online museum of Diana’s outfits, paid an estimated £100,000 for the entire collection after reading about the auction at Lay’s Auctioneers in Penzance, Cornwall, which was reported in this newspaper’s issue on Tuesday.
The dresses will now head to Los Angeles, where they will be preserved by The Princess & The Platypus Foundation and displayed at the Princess Diana Museum.
Tonight she said: ‘I saw the story on dailymail.com and… I contacted Jacques directly because I have worked with him in the past and I was very happy when he accepted my offer.
Princess of cool: Diana wore this beautiful ice blue dress in June 1997
Dazzling: two of Azagury’s ‘Famous Five’ outfits
Jacques Azagury (photo left) Diana’s fashion designer, with the dresses he made for her
‘I now have over 80 pieces of clothing that were once associated with Princess Diana and I am currently working on an exhibition of my entire collection that will travel around the world.
‘I am happy that the entire collection as a complete story is going to one museum. My only fear was that the items would be sold individually and scattered everywhere.”
It’s now almost forty years since Azagury met the princess: he showed his autumn/winter 1985 New Romantics collection at London’s Hyde Park Hotel, now the Mandarin Oriental. He then created a ballerina-length dress, with a royal blue organza skirt and a black bodice embroidered with blue stars, which she wore to a mayoral dinner at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in 1985.
He called the last five dresses he made for the princess the ‘Famous Five’. They were made after her divorce from Prince Charles, when she could be more daring. She loved them so much that she kept them and they are now believed to belong to Princes William and Harry.
Azagury always created a ‘twin’ of each dress he made for the princess, in the same dimensions and at the same time as the original, and stored them away. Now, after retiring and closing his eponymous shop in Knightsbridge, he has sold his Diana memorabilia.
In total he designed 18 outfits for the princess. The Famous Five includes a red silk column dress that Diana wore to a Red Cross gala dinner in Washington on June 17, 1997, an ice blue silk Georgette number, hand-studded with crystal bugle beads, which she wore for a June 3, 1997 Royal Gala performance of Swan Lake and a column of black Chantilly lace, embroidered with sequins and beads, which Diana wore to mark the centenary of Tate Britain, on her 36th birthday, on July 1, 1997.
Mimi Connell-Lay of Lay’s Auctioneers said: ‘We are very pleased to have been able to advise Mr Azagury on this matter and achieve such a successful outcome for all parties.’