In March, Joanna Osborne finally took on a task she’d been putting off for decades: cleaning out her attic. It was filled with baby clothes, fabric samples, toys, and archival sketches from her knitwear brand, Warm & Wonderful. Now that her children were all grown up—and Warm & Wonderful had been revived by New York–based company Rowing Blazers after a dormant period—it was finally time to sort through all this stuff.
But within an hour, Osborne realized it wasn’t just stuff at all. As she tore through a box of cotton bedspreads, a red sweater dotted with white sheep and one single black one flew out.
Osborne gasped. She immediately called her Warm & Wonderful cofounder, Sally Muir. “The jumper,” she uttered when Muir began describing her discovery.
In June 1981, four months after announcing her engagement to Prince Charles, the 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer attended a polo match in a distinctive black-sheep knit by Warm & Wonderful. Infatuated photographers snapped away at the future princess. The next day she and her farm-animal pullover were splashed across newspaper front pages around the world. Osborne and Muir’s brand, which they had started only two years prior, exploded as a result. “We started going to New York and showing at New York Fashion Week, which we probably wouldn’t have done before,” says Muir. “We went from being a very small, little cottage industry, really, to being a proper business.” (Osborne recalls receiving so many satchels of mail that they had to beg their friends’ teenage children to come and help open them.)
Over the next two decades, Princess Diana became arguably the most famous woman in the world and was captured wearing thousands of outfits across thousands of public appearances. Yet the black-sheep sweater still remains one of her most recognizable pieces—especially after she rewore it in 1983. In an era where Diana was often called Shy Di in the press, it showed a sense of humor and rebellion was simmering underneath: A black sheep, after all, represents someone who deviates from the traditional norms of their flock. As the princess broke from the royal family in the 1990s, the style statement became something bigger, a symbolic foreshadowing of who she became—and perhaps always was. “It’s entertaining, in a way, that clothes really aren’t on the whole,” Muir says of the sweater’s staying power. “It showed Diana was beginning to express herself a bit.”
Even today the piece of clothing has a grip on pop culture, with Emma Corrin wearing a replica in season four of The Crown. The Victoria and Albert Museum has one, produced in 1985, in its permanent collection. (“David Bowie and Penelope Keith had the same humorous design in different colorways,” the gallery label notes.) Meanwhile the rereleased design by Rowing Blazers was so popular that the brand now offers it in both men’s and women’s versions.
There was just one tiny detail most people didn’t know about the jumper’s origin: The princess had more than one.
A few weeks after the polo match, Osborne and Muir received a letter from Buckingham Palace. Lady Diana, it said, had damaged her sweater. Could Warm & Wonderful ever repair it? “She likes it very much,” they wrote. The cofounders say there were “horrified.”
“This was our golden moment. Our business was suddenly taking off. Then we get a letter from Buckingham Palace saying that she’d torn the jumper and could it either be replaced or repaired,” Osborne remembers. The palace sent them the sweater to inspect. Upon reviewing the damage—a detached cuff—they decided to simply send her a new one without telling anyone about it. On September 28, they wrote back: “I know Her Royal Highness will be very glad to have this sweater back and be most grateful to you for having redone it.” Osborne and Muir explain that, despite the black sheep being in a new place in the second design, no one noticed the two were different.
Meanwhile, they put the original in storage and forgot about it over the decades. They figured it must have been lost during one of their multiple moves. In fact, when Osborne found it in her attic, she didn’t think much of it at first. They had been surrounded by piles upon piles of black-sheep jumpers for nearly 50 years, so it wasn’t surprising that one or two from their old store were still lying around.
But then something caught her eye—a missing cuff: “I thought, My God, I think it’s the actual one because it had this cuff problem. Occasionally things went wrong with the sweater, but the cuff never fell off. It’s the only time this has happened.”
After the initial shock of the discovery wore off, they realized the next thing they needed to do was to pass it on to someone else. The sweater’s survival had been improbable enough: Without the protection of the cotton bedspread, theorizes Osborne, it would have been decimated by moths. “We don’t really want the responsibility of looking after this,” Osborne recalls thinking. Muir adds: “The very idea of having it is terrifying.”
So they called up Sotheby’s. One spring morning Osborne put it in a bag and hopped on a train to London. She presented the sweater, wrapped in a shroud, along with letters from Buckingham Palace.
A rigorous authentication process ensued. Cynthia Houlton, Sotheby’s global head of fashion and accessories, worked with a third-party company to conduct an in-depth inspection of images of Diana wearing the sweater in 1981 against the one discovered in the attic. “There were several unique match points from the 1981 images and the sweater, thus proving they are one and the same,” she says. A contract was quickly signed.
This week the sweater will finally go on display—along with the letters—at Sotheby’s galleries in London. In September, it will go up for auction in their inaugural Fashion Icons sale, where it’s estimated to fetch from $50,000 to $80,000.
And while the sweater will go to a single buyer, the attention around the sale will only ensure that its legacy—fashion and otherwise—extends to a new generation. “The beloved sweater and design has a unique way of evoking nostalgia and memories,” Houlton says.
