Designer Jacques Azagury had known Princess Diana for a decade when she died, and says that, when he was working with her on what would become their final collaboration in August 1997, she was “the best and happiest I had ever seen her.”
This final collaboration—which the Princess of Wales planned to wear to a Disney film premiere in September, had she lived to see it—was to be the most risque of the boundary-pushing dresses Azagury designed for Diana towards the end of her short life, which have come to be collectively known as the Famous Five. All worn around the time her divorce to Prince Charles was finalized in August 1996—and, in the process, officially marking her new status as a single woman—the Famous Five were a sartorial nod to a woman, at last, coming into her own, the type of dress Diana could never have worn as a working member of the royal family. The world knows about the Famous Five, but the story of the sixth Azagury creation at the very, very end of Diana’s life—called the Final Goodbye Dress—has previously been kept under wraps.
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“We didn’t really talk about it,” Azagury tells Vogue of why it was kept hidden. “Even when I did talks or exhibitions, I never did show that dress.”
Azagury does not refer to August 31, 1997 as the day Diana died—instead, he refers to it, poignantly, as “when she left.” When asked if the Final Goodbye Dress was too painful to talk about for all of those years, he thinks for a moment before responding, “I just found—I just feel it was very personal to me.” Now, though, he’s ready to share.
Azagury first met Princess Diana in 1987, when he was working on his second fashion collection. British Vogue editor Anna Harvey, who was a fashion mentor to Diana throughout her royal life, made the introduction. “Of course I was dumbstruck,” he says, “but within seconds, within seconds, she put me at ease.”
A few weeks after their initial meeting, the palace called, saying that Diana would like to visit Azagury’s atelier. She had noticed a dress from the collection that she ended up wearing—a black velvet creation with blue stars—which ultimately sold for $1.1 million, 11 times its estimated value, in 2023. “So that was our very, very first meeting together,” Azagury says. “And then, of course, we had a very good relationship right to literally two days before she left for Paris.”
Azagury estimates that he made about 20 dresses for Diana during their 10 years working together, but the Famous Five were when he “achieved the look that I wanted for her,” he says. He helped modernized her image with these five creations, starting with the Venice Dress in June 1995, a red silk georgette two-piece tunic worn to a fundraiser in the Italian city to raise money for London’s Serpentine Gallery. Three months later, she wore the Bashir Dress, a long black silk georgette dress with a fishtail hem, in London that September; she would wear it again to the Cancer Research Ball in New York City the following December. The last summer of her life, she wore the ice blue Swan Lake Dress to a performance of the ballet of the same name at Royal Albert Hall on June 3, 1997, and that same month, she wore the Washington Dress, a red silk georgette column gown, to a Red Cross Ball gala dinner in Washington, D.C. on June 18.
Diana also turned to Azagury for what would become the final birthday of her life, her 36th, where she wore the appropriately named 36th Birthday Dress on July 1, 1997. That creation, worn to the Tate Gallery that evening, was black Chantilly lace hand-embroidered with sequins and beads. This dress was the last evening gown Diana wore publicly before a car accident in Paris took her life two months later.
Of course, no one knew that summer would be her last, and Diana was planning for the future. The Final Goodbye Dress—a black (“her favorite,” Azagury says), pure silk georgette dress—was hand-beaded all over with bugle beads and featured a plunging neckline, a high front slit, and an “amazing train.”
“We were going to make it really Hollywood, this dress,” Azagury says. “And I think I started working on it perhaps three weeks before she went away.” The third and final fitting for the dress was less than a week before her death. “It was really stunning on her,” he says. “It was cut very, very low at the front—more daring. This was going to be the dress that sort of outed all the other dresses. And she looked absolutely amazing.” The dress was meant to represent glamour—to be a “really red carpet, Hollywood dress,” he says. “And really, when she put it on, you saw her in it—that’s exactly what it was.”
The dress was all but complete, save for the straps, which to this day are left pinned as if Diana could come back at any moment for that final adjustment. “We were waiting for her to come back for us to fix the straps,” Azagury says. “We were waiting for her to come back, which, sadly, as we now know, she didn’t come back.”
What Azagury remembers most about Diana, 28 years after her death, is how much fun she was. Their fittings were always very casual, he says; sometimes fittings would happen at the palace, and sometimes the Princess of Wales would pop down to his Knightsbridge shop. Interestingly, Azagury never designed a dress specifically for Diana—“they all came from the range,” he says. Sometimes the color would change, and, of course, the gowns were impeccably tailored to “make it Princess Diana.”
“I always made sure that absolutely everything was perfect on the garment, because I knew that she was going to be photographed from 500 different angles from a thousand photographers, so everything had to be perfect,” he says. “And she knew that I took particular attention to that.” Diana had great trust in him, Azagury remembers; by the end of their 10 years working together, he had watched Diana bloom from the remnants that still existed of “Shy Di” into a woman with strength and “confidence in what was coming in her life,” Azagury says. “And it’s a distinct difference to the earlier years in posture, in look, in confidence—everything is quite an extreme change, and [the Famous Five] were just reflecting her confidence in the woman that she had become.”
Azagury spoke to Diana on the phone in the days before she died. “The last phone call was very brief,” he says. “There was nothing really to report on that. But the last fitting was really quite—it was lots of fun. It was 11 o’clock in the morning, that I remember. I don’t think she had been up for very long, ‘cause her hair was still tousled.” This stood out, he says, because she was normally “picture perfect.” In that final fitting, Diana shared that photographer Mario Testino had taught her how to catwalk, “so she did a little walk for us in the dress,” Azagury says. “So that’s the kind of fun that we had together when we were together.”
While Azagury prefers to keep the subject of their final conversations private, he will speak on that final dress, which the designer says “represents the finality of her life, really. I mean, it represents her glamour, her being, and the unfinished story, the unfinished life, really. Here was this dress, standing, waiting for her to come back to slip into it and continue her life. And it never happened. So it really is quite poignant.”
Of losing the Princess of Wales, “It’s such a difficult thing to explain,” Azagury says. “Whichever way you look at it, Diana was a phenomenon. She was loved by people all over the world, anywhere that you went in the world, and you mentioned Princess Diana, they would know who she was, and everybody felt that they’d lost a special person.” Beyond the good work she did for a number of causes—during her royal life and after—“with fashion, I think people still miss it, because she got a lot of joy [out] of getting ready to go out,” Azagury says. “People just waited to see what she was going to wear next when she got out of the car. And of course, she never disappointed, particularly in those [later] years.”
The Famous Five and the Final Goodbye Dress now reside as an intact, cohesive collection at the virtual Princess Diana Museum, founded by Renae Plant in 2014 and home to over 100 items of Diana’s clothing and other memorabilia, like letters, accessories, and items from her childhood. After meeting Azagury in 2019, he told her about the existence of the hidden Final Goodbye Dress, and when he retired in 2023, Plant reached out. “And he immediately, without hesitation, said, ‘Renae, I’d love for you to preserve it in The Princess Diana Museum,’” Plant tells Vogue.
It was important to Azagury that the Famous Five and the Final Goodbye Dress all stayed together as a unit—a fashion arc. “I wanted the dresses to stay together, which possibly they wouldn’t have done had they gone into an open auction,” Azagury says. “For me, that was very important that they stay as a story. And even though I would’ve probably got a much bigger fee had I put them into an open auction, I was very happy that Renae, who’s a devout collector, was willing to keep them together.”
“And then the question of the last dress came, and I thought, ‘Well, I may as well let her have it, because what’s going to happen to it?’” he adds. “‘It’s going to be here in my home. Nobody’s going to see it.’ And really, it’s an ending to the story.”
In founding The Princess Diana Museum, Plant says her mission is “to acquire all these pieces and bring them back to one final resting place. So that’s been my objective this entire time, to reunite pieces that had been scattered all around the world. And so my thing is to keep them all together, and I think he realized how passionate I was about that, and I just felt so honored that he allowed that to happen. It was a meant to be moment.”
By the fall of 2026, Plant hopes to bring the exhibit in person, beginning in California and eventually going across the United States and then worldwide, ending up in the U.K. towards the end of the global tour. “These pieces definitely need to be seen in person, and it’s been my passion to get it out there for everybody,” she says, adding of the Final Goodbye Dress that “When you see it in person, it just takes your breath away.”
Of that dress in particular, Plant calls it “a piece of art. It’s one of those one of a kind pieces that you could just envision her wearing and just making such a sensation that night when she went out. Everyone would’ve been talking about this dress and how gorgeous she looked.”
Azagury has dressed many a famous person, but “all the celebrities, all the stars, Prime Ministers, everybody that I’ve met—the only person I ever got really excited meeting time after time after time was Princess Diana,” he says, calling the Princess of Wales “always absolutely delightful, and it was always a joy to work with her. It was always a happy moment, no matter what was going on in her life.”