Is it just me, or is the world going mad? Just look at this ‘story’ doing the rounds and tell me that this isn’t totally bonkers. I quote from the BBC’s website:
A dress worn by Diana, Princess of Wales in 1985 has been sold at auction for 11 times its estimated price.
The black, ballerina-length velvet evening dress was sold at Julien’s Auctions in Hollywood for a total of $1,148,080 (£904,262).
And here’s that dress:
I am, very obviously, no fashion expert. Happiness to me is a T shirt and jeans. So, a story about a dress worn 38 years ago by a woman who died 26 years is newsworthy simply because someone paid the best part of a million quid for it. Stop the world I want to get off.
There are, presumably, a number of possibilities as to why someone would pay that kind of money. They include:
- It’s been bought as an investment, in the assumption it will be worth even more in the years to come
- It will be displayed in a clothes museum, or somesuch, where people will pay to look at it
- Someone has bought it to wear
I’d imagine the third option is the least likely since – and here I am guessing because I don’t have a clue – it’s massively out of fashion. (I’d also suggest someone seeking to wear it might need urgent medical assistance, since it’s disgusting.)
This is the difference between the filthy rich and nearly everyone else. While the rest of us shop economically – welcome to Man at T K Maxx (me) – and to ensure we don’t walk around naked, some people buy clothes in the same way they buy gold, paintings and property.
Far be to for me to suggest that this sort of thing should be banned. As long as there are people with too much money on their hands, there will be financial obscenities like this. And in a country like the USA, where 12.4% of people live in abject poverty, a little bit of sick appears in my throat when I read about stuff like this.
Still, I suppose it gives journalists something to write about for the millions who are, bizarrely it seems to me, obsessed by a dead woman, formerly of a filthy rich and totally dysfunctional ‘royal’ family.
I’m looking forward to the guided tour of the Pont de l’Alma tunnel where Di drew her final breath or a jolly trip to Althorp was Di is buried. Oh wait. You can already do that. Plenty of money to be made in the mad old world of British royalty, eh?
