“When people in my life found out that I was going to play this part, this was the dress that everyone texted me about,” says Elizabeth Debicki of Princess Diana’s infamous Christina Stambolian LBD – instantly christened the “revenge dress” by the press when she wore it on the same night the then Prince of Wales confessed to adultery in a TV interview in 1994. When Debicki, who takes over from Emma Corrin as the late royal in the upcoming fifth series of The Crown, was bombarded with questions over whether the look would feature, “that’s when I started to realise how symbolic this dress is to people”, she says in a special episode of British Vogue’s Life in Looks video series.
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Debicki, one of four queens of the small screen celebrated on British Vogue’s December 2022 covers, discusses the lengthy costume fittings for the dress with Giles Hattersley in the issue, and describes the pressure of recreating such a seminal moment in royal history. “It’s a complex dress,” she says. “I let the fittings happen around me while I thought about what the dress meant.”
Once she had the look down, Debicki had to master Diana’s movement. “She was claiming the space. The way she walked out of that car, the luminosity, the strength of her as that car door opened, she was so fast and so forward,” shares Elizabeth. “It’s an extraordinary thing to watch. To decide what you’re saying about yourself through fashion… it was a currency – an incredibly powerful currency.”
Paparazzi shots of Debicki on set last year show revealed the Australian actor had nailed Diana’s simultaneously commanding and charmingly bashful presence. With her perfectly coiffed crop and effortless glow, Elizabeth embodied the princess in one of her most publicised – and dissected – moments. As the Princess’s former stylist and the late Vogue editor Anna Harvey once said of that summer night in 1994: “She wanted to look a million dollars – and she did.”
