Princess Diana dress designer Jacques Azagury interview Julien’s Auction

Designer Jacques Azagury has fond memories of visiting Kensington Palace during his many fittings with Diana, Princess of Wales.

They’re experiences he still cannot quite believed actually happened.

“We were just sitting there at the palace, sort of open-mouthed, thinking, ‘Is this real? We are sitting in Princess Diana’s room’,” Azagury told 9honey from London.

Watch the video above.

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“And that never changed. It was always a thrill, always.”

He and his sister Solange would meet with the princess in her living room, sometimes her bedroom, within her Kensington Palace apartment, where they would discuss designs and fabrics for coming events.

Although he enjoyed visiting Diana’s quarters at the palace, she preferred popping into Azagury’s London boutique.

“She used to love coming to the shop, she said it would get her out of the palace,” he said.

“The minute she would come in, she would go straight into the workroom, to the back, and start chatting to all of the girls.”

Azagury began working with Diana in the mid-1980s when she wore a ballerina-length evening dress by the Moroccan-British fashion designer in Florence, in 1985 and in Vancouver in 1986.

In December 2023, the dress sold for a record-breaking $US1,148,080 (approx. $1.7 million) when it went under the hammer in Hollywood through Julien’s Auctions. It became the most expensive item of her clothing to be sold, fetching 11 times the asking price.

Azagury is working with Julien’s again and has three sketches in its coming event, Princess Diana’s Style & A Royal Collection auction.

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It is set to be the biggest ever sale of clothing and accessories worn by the late Princess of Wales and will take place at the Peninsula Beverly Hills on June 26.

Among the items going to auction include the 1988 Bellville Sassoon floral day frock, widely known as Diana’s “caring dress”, her Lady Dior handbag, a white Catherine Walker gown and a black sequin-embellished silk taffeta evening dress designed by Elizabeth Emanuel, who co-designed Diana’s wedding gown.

“For me I am doing it just to keep Diana’s legacy alive,” Azagury said.

“It’s just unbelievable to think that it’s 28 years since it happened [Diana’s death in 1997], I kind of still think she is here.”

His design sketches for three dresses worn by Diana in 1997 are included in the auction, two featuring an original fabric swatch.

They are of the red evening gown worn on June 17, in Washington DC, the ice blue cocktail dress worn to a performance of Swan Lake in London on June 3 and the beaded black gown worn on what would be Diana’s final birthday, July 1, when she attended a gala at the Tate Gallery.

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“That period is when I had seen her as the happiest ever and she was definitely moving onto something spectacularly good,” Azagury said.

“When she was leaving for Paris, I saw her a couple of days before. She was so, so happy… So who knows.”

Those three gowns and two others – a short beaded red dress worn in Venice in June 1995 and a black silk georgette dress worn in November 1995 – make up Azagury’s collection known as Diana’s ‘famous five’.

Although Azagury’s work with Diana spanned more than just those five dresses, they are firmly cemented in fashion history for what they did to the princess’ public image.

“They weren’t traditional royal dresses,” he explained.

“When I first started working with Diana, it was my aim to take her away from all the frills and all the fuss.

“She was the most beautiful woman, she didn’t need very much. It was all about the fit, gorgeous fabric and the right colour for her – that’s all you needed to do with her.”

Interestingly, Azagury never made anything specifically for Diana. The outfits she wore were current designs or clothes from coming collections, with adjustments made only to the sizing, colour or fabric.

“We got her to the ‘famous five’, which is when she really understood herself personally, spiritually and physically, and I think those famous five dresses portray that.

“It was kind of her release away from protocol, it was her freedom.” 

The so-called ‘Martin Bashir’ dress was worn on the night Diana’s infamous interview with the BBC went to air on November 20, 1995, causing shockwaves around the world and within Buckingham Palace.

Diana was due to attend a charity event and had requested a dress that would send a bold message, Azagury said.

“She called me to the palace and told me, ‘Look Jacques, I’ve done this interview, it’s not bad, it’s just telling things the way they are and it’s going to shock lots of people and I’m going to be attending a cancer fundraiser that evening, I need a dress’.

Black was chosen for the gown because “up to that stage, she knew she wasn’t allowed to wear black because the royals only wear black for funerals”.

“So that was the first kick in the teeth,” he said.

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“We kept it very simple, very sexy and in a way it was her coming out dress saying ‘I am now a free woman, I can wear black, I can be sexy without anybody saying anything’.

“Each of those dresses had a defining moment in her career but they were all sort of freeing her, they were freeing dresses for her.”

Those five dresses marked a major shift from the early days of Diana’s sartorial royal career to the months before her death, he said.

“The changes were drastic. When I first made that blue dress for her [in 1985] she was not a child – she wasn’t quite yet a woman – she was still very shy, she was stooped because of her height, she was always looking down.

“You don’t see any of that towards the end where she completely got her own confidence, she became her own woman.

“There is such a difference between the beginning and the end as we knew her.”

Azagury closed his Knightsbridge shop in September, 2023, and is now retired after a forty-year career.

Princess Diana’s life in pictures

But one thing he’ll never stop doing is talking about his time working with the princess.

“Anything that is asked of me to do with Diana I will always do it because it’s my way of keeping her alive, really.

“All our meetings, they were always happy times, we always enjoyed ourselves.

“We had a couple of conversations from time to time but most of the time they were joyous occasions.”

Did they ever clash, creatively?

“Only when she wanted to go super short on her skirt length and we said, ‘You can’t, you’re a princess’,” he laughed.

“Her physique was phenomenal, she had the most amazing legs. Her eyes were so blue, they were the colour of that little blue dress, the ‘Swan Lake dress’.

“That was the colour of her eyes. She was a beautiful woman, there is no doubting it.”

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