Notorious ‘black sheep’ sweater of Princess Diana at Sotheby’s auction

Fans of the ‘people’s princess’, the tragically deceased Lady Diana, will have the opportunity to acquire one of the iconic clothing pieces from her wardrobe. At the end of August, the auction house Sotheby’s will put her notorious ‘black sheep’ sweater up for online sale, which the princess wore at a polo match of her then-husband, the current King Charles.

The red sweater with a white background and one black sheep was designed for the princess by Sally Muir and Joanna Osborne from the knitwear company Warm&Wonderful. Legend has it that Diana loved this piece of clothing so much that she asked the Buckingham Palace secretariat to call Muir and Osborne to design her another one after she tore the first one at the sleeve.

Fashion as a secret language

Diana wore this new piece at an event in 1983, and it is now part of the permanent collection of the Victoria&Albert Museum in London, while the original from the polo match was recently found in the attic of Warm&Wonderful and is now in the hands of Sotheby’s auction house. Although experts predict that the sweater could reach a price of 80,000 dollars, it is quite possible that the final price will exceed expectations.

Namely, one of Diana’s favorite dresses – a purple velvet ball gown designed by Victor Edelstein for a Vanity Fair shoot in 1997 – was estimated at a maximum price of 110,000 euros, but ultimately sold for nearly five times that amount, or 537,000 euros. The sweater is particularly interesting to the public as it is speculated that she wanted to convey to the world that she felt like the black sheep of the royal family.

For Diana, fashion served as a kind of coded, secret language with which she communicated with her admirers. Thus, she made history in the summer of 1994 when she appeared at a Vanity Fair party in a black, off-the-shoulder mini dress by Greek designer Christine Stambolian. Since Charles publicly admitted infidelity at that time, the dress was dubbed ‘the revenge dress.’