Princess Diana Related with Kathy Hilton on This Style Merchandise at Diana’s One and Solely Met Gala

Regardless of being a world style icon, Princess Diana attended just one Met Gala—and it was simply eight months earlier than her tragic demise in August 1997.

In December 1996—earlier than the Met was famously the primary Monday in Might—the Princess of Wales attended the gala on the arm of Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Liz Tilberis, who was chairing the occasion that 12 months. For the event, Diana wore midnight blue Dior by John Galliano at her solely Met look (which probably wouldn’t have been her final had she not died months later in a Paris automobile accident).

Kathy Hilton shared recollections of Diana on the Met with Us Weekly, recalling that she “obtained to satisfy her, and that was very thrilling.”

“We each had the little Woman Dior bag,” Hilton recalled of the bag the home named after Diana herself. “I used to be very excited that I had a bag like hers, as a result of there weren’t many in America.”

Not many members of the royal household have attended the Met—for instance, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle by no means have—and aside from Diana, from the British royal household, solely Princess Beatrice has attended, which she did in 2018.

Diana’s silk slip costume—which resembled lingerie—was her most daring look to this point, and it virtually didn’t make its method out of the doorways of Kensington Palace. Royal biographer Katie Nicholl wrote in her 2010 guide William and Harry that Diana had reservations in regards to the daring look, largely about how her son Prince William—who was 14 years outdated on the time and struggling together with her divorce from Prince Charles 4 months prior—would react to it. However, “in the end, the urge to make a daring sartorial assertion as a newly single girl received out,” Yahoo reported.

Contained in the occasion itself, Diana was accompanied by Tilberis and Galliano and was deemed the “belle of the ball,” Marie Claire reported. Of Diana’s 1996 Met look, Eloise Moran, creator of The Lady Di Look Book: What Diana Was Trying to Tell Us Through Her Clothes, instructed Yahoo that it “was one in all her most stunning attire. However I assumed she regarded fabulous. She simply seems so completely satisfied and assured.”

“I feel she was embracing it and having fun with it,” Moran mentioned of Diana pushing the envelope by her private model. “She knew she might by no means eliminate the eye and the highlight on her, however I feel she was positioning it another way, as a sort of worldwide megastar, Marilyn Monroe-type icon fairly than a member of the royal household. And I feel the costume actually mirrored that.”

Again to Hilton for a second forward of this 12 months’s Met Gala this night: when Us Weekly requested if different members of the Actual Housewives franchises ought to make the visitor listing, Hilton replied, “Anna Wintour makes that listing, so I can’t weigh in on that. All of them should go as soon as. I imply, it’s nice. I’ve been again within the day, and it is extremely, very thrilling.”