Diana never wore this gown to any engagements, but she did use it for some photo shoots (right).
It also appears to have been something originally chosen by Nelson Shanks when he began working on her portrait in 1994. Some accounts indicate Diana's only request was to be shown wearing the Queen Mary emerald choker she had been given as a wedding gift, and apparently the artist's first choice for clothing, after rummaging through her extensive closets as Kensington Palace, was this gown, according to a head study sold in 2022.
When Diana auctioned off 79 of her dresses for charity in 1997, this Catherine Walker dress was Lot 31, described as "a long dinner dress of bottle green velvet", and fetched $24,150. It was displayed in the spring of 1998 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and later that year the owner. a Boston philanthropist, resold it at Skinner's in Boston to raise money for the Pine Street Inn, a woman's homeless shelter. Like mamy of Diana's gowns. it eventually made its way back 'home' to Kensington Palace, first shown there in a January 2016 exhibit of royal fashions called "Fashion Rules: Restyled", and in the 2017 "Diana: Her Fashion Story". It currently remains in the possession of Historic Royal Palaces at Kensington Palace..
