Princess Diana Had to Be Stopped from Wearing More and More Risqué Looks in Her Final Years

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“She wanted to go super short on the skirts.”

Key Points

• After her split from Prince Charles in 1992 and before the end of her life in 1997, Princess Diana wore some of her most daring looks in the form of the “Famous Five,” five dresses designed by Jacques Azagury.
• The five looks were worn from June 1995 to July 1997 and were risqué and boundary pushing.
• Azagury said in a recent podcast interview that Diana actually wanted the creations to be even sexier, but that he and her butler demurred at the idea.

Towards the end of her far too short life, Princess Diana continually pushed the envelope with risqué fashion—a far departure from her years as a working royal prior to her 1992 separation and 1996 divorce from Prince Charles.

Especially around the time of her divorce being finalized—tragically just 368 days before she lost her life in a Paris car accident on August 31, 1997—the former Princess of Wales was officially a single woman and took her style to bold new heights. Jacques Azagury was a designer Diana turned to with frequency, in her royal life, yes, but with gusto in her later years. He is the mastermind behind Diana’s so-called “Famous Five” dresses—five looks from 1995 to 1997 that were more daring and sexy than she’d ever gone before. According to Hello!, Diana wanted to push the envelope even further, but Azagury and Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell stopped that from happening.

Speaking on the outlet’s “A Right Royal Podcast,” Azagury said that he and the late royal only disagreed “when she wanted to go super short on the skirts.”

“Paul Burrell, her butler, and myself would say, ‘That’s as short as you can go,’” Azagury said on the show. “Take the blue dress. She even wanted to go shorter than that on the dress. And we said, ‘Well, look, there’s not much dress at the top, there’s not much dress at the bottom. You’ll end up with nothing in between.’”

The “Famous Five” include the red Venice dress, worn in June 1995 to the Italian city; the black Bashir dress, worn in London in September 1995 and again in New York City in December of that same year; and three memorable dresses worn the final summer of her life: the aforementioned blue Swan Lake dress, worn to a performance of the ballet of that same name on June 3, 1997; the red Washington dress, worn on June 18, 1997 in Washington, D.C.; and the black 36th birthday dress, worn to an event on July 1, 1997, which would be, tragically, Diana’s final birthday. The birthday dress would, unknowingly, also serve as Diana’s last red carpet event before her death almost two months later.

“She was always very excited by fashion, and she knew she would please so many people just waiting for her to come out in the next dress, whether they were waiting in the streets or watching her on the television,” Azagury told People. “She took a long time making sure that everything was just right, choosing the right shoes and jewelry.”

Of Diana, he added, “She was the only person I was really excited to meet, time after time. Every moment was so exciting to me, and we had so much fun. I never got any of the troubled Diana—whenever we were together, it was just joyous.”

“After the breakup of the marriage, she rediscovered herself and she turned into this unbelievably stunning woman—not that she wasn’t before, but that’s when her personality really started to shine,” Azagury continued. “She had everything—the most amazing legs, that great hair, those blue eyes.”

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