She purged her closets of the past. Diana hated the sight of the froufrou'd and sequined relics of her roles as Princess Bride and Windsor Wife and Dynasty Di, embalmed in their suit bags. It was Prince William's brainstorm for her to auction off her old gowns for charity in New York, and Diana loved the notion. It would be at once a glorious psychic gesture to her new life and a boon to the charities she chose, including the aids Crisis Trust and the Royal Marsden Hospital. A royal rummage sale had never happened before. Most of the Windsor women, including the Queen, consign their old private-occasion items to a discreetly respectable resale shop in London's West End. Diana's auction would be a first.
Old clothes are often suffused with the emotions of the wearer. Meredith Etherington-Smith, who also worked as marketing director of Christie's, was assigned by the auction house to help Diana choose and catalogue the items. They sorted through gowns every morning for a month while Diana relived the occasions on which she had worn them. "Out! Out!" she would cry, pointing at some star-spangled throwback, or "No! I can't bear to give up this one!" In and out of the catalogue flew Victor Edelstein's oyster dinner dress with a strapless bodice encrusted with white bugle beads and matching bolero, which she had worn that elegant night at the Élysée Palace with President and Madame Mitterrand. "It was such a happy evening," she said. She had been afraid of the French being so chic, but she felt she had really pulled it off. She sighed over another Edelstein gown, an ink-blue silk-velvet creation. This was the dress in which she had wowed the world dancing with John Travolta at the White House. She relinquished it in the end, knowing it would get the auction's top dollar. (An anonymous bidder snapped it up for $222,500.) In retrospect, wrote the fashion maven Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune, all the high-glamour outfits of Diana's past looked "like a dress rehearsal for the little black number worn on the evening Prince Charles confessed to adultery on prime-time television.