Diana & THE Sweater

Bidding begins today. And, the auctions of "everyday" things that haunt us.

LAST DANCE, LAST CHANCE🪩💃🏻🚨! For all of August, annual Paid subscriptions to ATA have been 40% off—that means a huge chunk of our tiny, special world is still up for grabs for just $30. More thrifting, more (mini) makeover magic, and more life lessons on doing a lot with a little. Come join us🧡🔥

Photo: Princess Diana Archive/Getty Images.

When I first read last month that the sweater worn/owned by Diana Frances Spencer—Diana, the Princess of Wales—was going up for auction, I immediately wondered, maybe even worried, where and to whom this knitted piece of history was going to next. Who would own it…maybe even wear it. If they could afford the estimated $80k+ it will likely command to make it theirs (or more), who could blame them?

I was living at home with my parents in 1997 when my college friend Kelly and I came home from a local bar, immediately struck by headlines pouring in. We sat in the dark most of the night watching BBC on my tiny TV…in shock and weeping like mostly everyone. It just couldn’t be. After everything….it wasn’t fair.

Diana wasn’t only Beautiful, Radiant, Royalty, Intriguing…she was real. Despite her storybook beginnings, first showing up in this very sweater at a polo match a month before her wedding—at 19—Diana wasn’t a fantasy the way we’ve all been conditioned to believe princesses are. She was truly unlike anyone we’d ever known before, at least in my own lifetime. And yet, in some small private way, she seemed so much like each of us: shy and hesitant with lots to prove, but also, so evidently with a palpable purpose…something to give the world, other than just her beauty. And over the years as we watched from a vast distance as the life she began on every screen and radio station the world over began to erode and collapse…we saw ourselves again. Every one of us, wounded outsiders trying to figure out where we belonged. And with whom.