Lady Diana’s black sheep flies at auction: the sweater worn by the future Princess of Wales when she was still Diana Spencer, nineteen-year-old engaged to Prince Charles, changed hands for one million 143 thousand dollars excluding auction fees. The red pullover with puffed sleeves on which a black sheep stands out in a flock of white sheep was sold at the end of the first Sotheby’s auction dedicated to some “Fashion Icons”.
Diana is going strong: the initial estimate for the sweater was between 50 and 80 thousand dollars. Good result also for an evening dress designed by Murray Arbeid that the princess wore twice in 1985: the hammer stopped at 380 thousand dollars. Diana was just weeks away from marrying her when in June 1981 she was photographed wearing the jumper at her future husband’s polo match. An unconventional choice also because golf was one of the first creations of Warm and Wonderful, a knitwear line founded two years earlier by two friends, Sally Muir and Joanna Osborne, selling wool sweaters and hats on a stall in Covent Garden.
With the exception of Margaret, Diana was the first member of the British royal family to demonstrate a real interest in fashion, notes Sotheby’s. Before the famous Revenge Dress, worn at a Serpentine Gallery party the evening in which Carlo announced on TV that he had cheated on her with Camilla Parker Bowles, the black sheep sweater was the first real statement of a young woman rebelling against the conventions imposed by Buckingham Palace but also capable of a sense of humor. The 1994 revenge dress and the black sheep sweater constitute in this sense the bookmarks of a union doomed to failure.
The jumper did not remain in Diana’s wardrobes for long: it was sent back to Warm and Wonderful because it was slightly damaged and the Princess’s secretary Oliver Everett had written to Osborne asking for it to be repaired or replaced. A new sweater was quickly produced and shipped to the Palace and in 1983, now a princess, Diana wore it to another polo match over white jeans and a black ribbon at the collar of a white shirt. The old golf, forgotten by everyone until a few months ago, seemed lost. Until searching in the archives among over 2000 never-made projects, Osborne found the original item returned by Diana in a box. The photos worn by the princess had meanwhile made it a truly iconic garment, so much so that in 2020 the CEO of the Rowing Blazer brand, Jack Carlson, asked to enter into a partnership with the two designers to reproduce the sweater in his fashion line: now that version , sold for 248 dollars, is selling like hot cakes among very young girls and there is a long waiting list until November to buy it.
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