Princess Diana made a strong statement at the 1996 Met Gala, only months after being released from the palace’s regulations, by wearing a provocative vengeance dress.
The late princess’s inky-colored, lingerie-inspired outfit, which she chose to wear without a bra, “was a reflection of how she was already feeling” and the independence she felt after divorcing the now-king.
Princess Diana, like Cinderella, slid into her chariot before midnight on December 9, 1996, and left the Met Gala event.
Before slipping into a long vehicle that whisked her from New York’s Metropolitan Museum to her room at the Carlyle Hotel, the late Princess of Wales drank champagne, dined with the world’s finest designers, and stunned event attendees with her unroyal clothes.
After 15 years of marriage, Diana was free from the royal family’s severe regulations. Her divorce from the now-King Charles III was completed in August of that same year.
lingerie-inspired outfit
Diana made her Met Gala debut wearing a lingerie-inspired silk navy-blue slip dress with black lace, which she matched with a matching silk robe. She accented the gown with glittering sapphire earrings and a choker necklace made from a sapphire brooch given to her by the Queen Mother on her wedding day to Charles.
But it wasn’t the sapphire jewelry that attracted attention that evening.
According to Eloise Moran, author of “The Lady Di Look Book: What Diana Was Trying To Tell Us Through Her Clothes,” Diana’s ensemble was a “beautiful” look.
“That was one of her most outrageous gowns. But I thought she looked great. Moran told Yahoo: “She just looks so happy and confident.” “I believe she was embracing and loving it. She knew she’d never be able to escape the attention and focus, but I believe she was presenting herself as a worldwide megastar, a Marilyn Monroe-type figure rather than a member of the royal family. And I believe the clothing accurately expressed that.
Bra-less
According to fashion critic Hilary Alexander, it’s not unusual to see celebrities “wearing underwear as outerwear, but for a princess to do so at a formal occasion is a different matter.”
Diana adds of her midnight blue dress, which cost around $12,5000 at the time, “It is a very sensual rather than overly se*y dress, and it is a million miles away from the more formal outfits she usually picks.”
“It represents a new kind of royal dressing,” she writes in the Daily Mail.
But not everyone was impressed by Diana’s se*y silhouette.
“It was not so much haute couture as Oh! Couture,” said fashion critic, Brenda Polan. “The problem, and there is no delicate way of saying this, is that it looked like she had accidentally stepped out in her nightie, which meant, of course, that she wasn’t wearing a bra.”
The first “fateful” dress.
Still, Diana pulled off the bold look with ease, just as she did in 1994 when Charles “aired out some serious dirty laundry” and admitted to having an affair with his now-wife, Camilla, the queen to his king.
But the late princess did not skip a beat.
On June 29, 1994, the same day her then-husband confessed, the woman attended an event at London’s Serpentine Gallery in a jaw-dropping “fateful dress.”
Diana looked stunning at the event in a tight black off-the-shoulder gown with an asymmetrical skirt and a chiffon train that floated in the breeze.
“She didn’t need to say anything in words. “It was a fashion response, and that dress became her clear message to Charles and the world,” People reports.
‘Liberated’
At the Met Gala, her dress conveyed a sense of liberation.
John Galliano, the designer of Diana’s Christian Dior gown, told the Wall Street Journal in 2018 that she felt “liberated” after her divorce and decided to liberate her breasts by going bra-less.
