The Revenge Dress Scene Was “Pure Pressure,” Says The Crown’s Elizabeth Debicki

When Netflix announced Elizabeth Debicki would take over from Emma Corrin as Princess Diana in The Crown, all the actor’s friends wanted to know was whether she’d get to wear the coveted “revenge dress”, as told British Vogue. It was then that the penny really dropped for Debicki, and that she “started to realise how symbolic this dress is to people.”

Diana, Princess of Wales, wore the iconic dress – a black, off-the-shoulder, figure-hugging cocktail dress designed by Christina Stambolian – in 1994 to attend a Vanity Fair party at the Serpentine Gallery in London. She paired the outfit with a pearl necklace featuring a sapphire brooch that once belonged to the Queen Mother. Debicki describes the fittings as lengthy. “It’s a complex dress. I let the fittings happen around me while I thought about what the dress meant.”

According to Reader’s Digest, the dress was made three years prior, but at the time she thought it was “too daring.” The night she decided to wear it coincided with the airing of a documentary in which Prince Charles confessed to committing adultery with Camilla Parker-Bowles. Choosing to wear the dress at the last minute, Diana’s former stylist and former Vogue editor Anna Harvey said, “she wanted to look a million dollars – and she did.” As Dibicki notes while taking British Vogue through Diana’s most iconic looks, the princess was on the front page of the papers the next day, rather than Charles.

“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 forward,” Debicki said in the new interview. “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.”

Despite the dress being a big “pressure” for Debicki to pull off, she took comfort in knowing she was playing a fictional version of Princess Diana, rather than an impersonation. “I think in the very beginning that did overwhelm me, the idea of this kind of collection [of Diana disciples] out there,” she said. But when she read the scripts for the first time, she realised, “this isn’t meta. These are characters. It’s a part.”