The Untold Story Behind the Final Jacques Azagury Dress Princess Diana Never Got to Wear
'We didn't really talk about it,' Azagury tells Vogue of why it was kept hidden. 'Even when I did talks or exhibitions, I never did show that dress.'
Azagury does not refer to August 31, 1997 as the day Diana died—instead, he refers to it, poignantly, as 'when she left.' When asked if the Final Goodbye Dress was too painful to talk about for all of those years, he thinks for a moment before responding, 'I just found—I just feel it was very personal to me.' Now, though, he's ready to share.
Azagury first met Princess Diana in 1987, when he was working on his second fashion collection. British Vogue editor Anna Harvey, who was a fashion mentor to Diana throughout her royal life, made the introduction. 'Of course I was dumbstruck,' he says, 'but within seconds, within seconds, she put me at ease.'
A few weeks after their initial meeting, the palace called, saying that Diana would like to visit Azagury's atelier. She had noticed a dress from the collection that she ended up wearing—a black velvet creation with blue stars—which ultimately sold for $1.1 million, 11 times its estimated value, in 2023. 'So that was our very, very first meeting together,' Azagury says. 'And then, of course, we had a very good relationship right to literally two days before she left for Paris.'
Azagury estimates that he made about 20 dresses for Diana during their 10 years working together, but the Famous Five were when he 'achieved the look that I wanted for her,' he says. He helped modernized her image with these five creations, starting with the Venice Dress in June 1995, a red silk georgette two-piece tunic worn to a fundraiser in the Italian city to raise money for London's Serpentine Gallery. Three months later, she wore the Bashir Dress, a long black silk georgette dress with a fishtail hem, in London that September; she would wear it again to the Cancer Research Ball in New York City the following December. The last summer of her life, she wore the ice blue Swan Lake Dress to a performance of the ballet of the same name at Royal Albert Hall on June 3, 1997, and that same month, she wore the Washington Dress, a red silk georgette column gown, to a Red Cross Ball gala dinner in Washington, D.C. on June 18.
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