Princess Diana and Prince Charles descend a staircase while attending a formal state dinner in Bahrain during a Gulf tour in 1986. Harper’s Bazaar Arabia published a story claiming the dress could sell for a “small fortune” when it goes up for auction on December 10, 2018. The current owner of the dress purchased it at a secondhand store in Hereford after it was donated by a housekeeper.

Recently, as I was searching online for a photo of Princess Diana to print on the front page of this publication, I was disappointed to find that most headlines from August 31, 1997 were extraordinarily ordinary. This was the news story of the decade, and the newspapers had chosen random mainstream media photographs of the princess, or horribly preferred to exclaim in giant letters: “DIANA DEAD”. I was disappointed because this research was destroying the image I had of her on those front pages, scandalizing the life of this beautiful woman whose death was gruesome and premature. I abandoned my countless tabs and opened a new one, searching instead for “Diana in Bahrain”. I wasn’t even sure if she ever visited Bahrain. I was more hopeful to find a Bahraini newspaper reporting about her death. What I found was even better. The first result came from the Harper’s Bazaar Arabia website, with an article published a little over a month earlier on Dec 8, 2018. The title read: A Dress Worn By Princess Diana In Bahrain Is Being Auctioned Off For A Ton Of Money. Photographs that accompanied the article showed a younger Diana, almost ten years before her death, before divorce, before scandal, before her candle began flickering in the wind.