Princess Diana’s Beloved Cannes Film Festival Dress Paid Homage to Both Princess Grace of Monaco and the South of France
“As with all of Diana’s looks, a lot of thought and preparation had gone into the moment.”
When Prince Charles and Princess Diana attended the 40th Cannes Film Festival in May 1987, they were there for a whirlwind 10-hour visit, one that saw the Prince and Princess of Wales meet and greet and mingle with a bevy of Hollywood’s finest actors and actresses.
Charles and Diana's trip to Cannes in May 1987 was brief, as the couple were only on the ground for about 10 hours before heading back to London.
There to promote and support the British film industry, after touching down in Nice, France, they toured the British film pavilion, spent some time relaxing on a private yacht, and emerged that evening in full Hollywood glamor to attend a screening of the Bette Davis movie The Whales of August and a gala dinner, where Sir Alec Guinness was the guest of honor. While at the dinner, they were joined by an impressive group of British actors and actresses, and after, hopped on a plane to head directly back to London.
As ever, Diana’s fashion stole the show. Her soft blue Catherine Walker gown—a tulle strapless dress—was accompanied by “a matching chiffon scarf that looped around her neck and billowed out behind her as she walked,” British Vogue describes. (As Newsweek put it, the scarf was dramatically noticed as it kept “catching the breeze that was high on the evening of the film screening.") Diana’s dress, actually, was inspired by what the outlet calls “one of the original icons of the French film festival,” Grace Kelly. Grace—an Academy Award-winning actress—actually met her future husband, Prince Rainier of Monaco, while attending the famed film festival; after meeting in April 1955, the two were married almost exactly a year later, in April 1956.
This Grace Kelly look from 1955's "To Catch A Thief" served as Diana's inspiration for her 1987 Cannes gown.
In this look, Diana paid homage not just to Grace Kelly (a famous icon of Cannes, and later the Princess of Monaco) but also the South of France.
Diana and her designer, Catherine Walker, were inspired by the blue Edith Head gown that Grace wore in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film To Catch A Thief, “which, fittingly, was filmed on the French Riviera,” British Vogue writes. Grace’s character Frances Stevens’ “Grecian-style gown was made from two shades of powder blue, with a matching chiffon shawl attached to one of the spaghetti straps,” the outlet continues. “She [Grace] wore no jewelry, in order to keep the focus solely on the drama of the sweeping tulle dress.” The cool shade of blue was chosen purposefully to reflect the icy character of Frances Stevens, as Hitchcock himself explained in a 1962 interview: “I deliberately photographed Grace Kelly ice-cold and I kept cutting to her profile, looking classical, beautiful, and very distant,” he said.
Diana’s decision to wear this gown—which she paired with flat baby blue shoes, aquamarine and diamond chandelier earrings, and a matching bracelet—was very intentional: “As with all of Diana’s looks, a lot of thought and preparation had gone into the moment,” Tatler reports.
Diana was a genius sartorially, and always put ample thought into her outfit choices, many of them filled with meaning and symbolism.
Catherine Walker, who designed this dress, was a designer frequently employed by the Princess of Wales.
As Marie Claire previously reported, Diana and Grace had met before, in March 1981, soon after Diana’s engagement to Charles was announced, and when she was still Lady Diana Spencer. (Charles and Diana would marry four months later on July 29.) As detailed in J. Randy Taraborrelli’s book Once Upon a Time: Behind the Fairy Tale of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier, Diana burst into tears in front of Grace while she was touching up her makeup in the ladies’ room mirror. Grace, too, had married into a royal family—hers the House of Grimaldi—25 years prior; Diana “also said that she now realized more than ever how unbearable it would be to have so many people jostling for her attention, asking questions, not only of her, but of anyone who knew her,” Taraborrelli wrote. “She foresaw a life totally devoid of privacy. She was frightened. What could she do? She was certainly asking the right woman for advice. Grace had always known how to use her celebrity to her advantage, whereas Diana seemed to shrivel under the spotlight’s glare.”
If in that moment Diana was looking for reassuring words of comfort from Grace, she must have felt disappointed. Grace, then 51, put her arms around 19-year-old Diana and patted her on the shoulder. Grace then put one hand on each of Diana’s cheeks, cupping her face. “Don’t worry, dear,” Grace told Diana with a gentle smile. “You see, it’ll only get worse.”
Diana and Grace on the night they met in March 1981.
The Prince and Princess of Wales went to Cannes to promote the British film industry.
The next year, in September 1982, Grace was dead following injuries sustained in a car accident at just 52 years old; Diana, eerily, would meet the same fate—dying in a car accident—but she at just 36 years old in August 1997. Long before that, though, Diana attended Grace’s funeral, just three months after giving birth to her first child, Prince William, in June 1982. Diana later told her biographer Andrew Morton that she found Grace to be “wonderful and serene,” but concluded “there was troubled water under her. I saw that.”
For her homage to Grace five years after her death, “Diana wore a pair of earrings with diamond floral studs and pear-shaped aquamarine drops set in a slender diamond frame," The Court Jeweller reports. “She also wore an aquamarine and diamond bracelet on her right wrist.” Both Grace’s and Diana’s gowns “are considered important parts of fashion history,” British Vogue writes, and Diana’s dress was widely praised—with the tribute to Grace not going unnoticed.
Diana's homage to Grace did not go unnoticed by the media.
The dress was well received, and both Diana and Grace's similar gowns both have a place in fashion history.
Diana apparently liked the gown enough to wear it again, and in relatively short order, wearing it again to the premiere of the 1989 musical Miss Saigon. It was later chosen by Diana to be a part of her 1997 auctioning of 79 of her most iconic dresses with Christie’s auction house, and the dress sold for $70,700 (which amounts to over $100,000 today). The buyer of the dress back in 1997 was the U.S. cable TV station Romance Classics, which, after Diana died, displayed the dress to raise funds for the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund. From there, the dress was put up for auction again in 2011, at the L.A.-based Julien’s Auction House as part of its Hollywood Legends Memorabilia sale, but wasn’t sold until 2013. It sold for over $132,000, with the proceeds going to a children’s charity, and now forms part of the collection belonging to the Chilean fashion museum, the Museo de la Moda. In 2017, the gown was displayed at Diana’s former home, Kensington Palace, in a special exhibition honoring the 20th anniversary of her death.
Diana apparently liked the dress, as she opted to wear it again two years later; it was also chosen as one of her 79 most iconic dresses as part of her Christie's auction in 1997.
It has been sold a couple of times since 1997 and has been a part of a few exhibitions, including one at Kensington Palace, Diana's former home, in 2017.
