Up for auction: What does Princess Diana's 'black sheep' sweater symbolise?

Diana, Princess of Wales — late wife of King Charles III, and mother of Prince Harry and Prince William — wore a red sweater with a sheep print a month before she wore her famous wedding dress and years before she made headlines in her infamous "revenge dress", which served as an enduring metaphor for Diana's life as a royal.

Diana originally wore the Warm & Wonderful brand item to a polo match in 1981 when she was 19 years old and only a few weeks away from marrying the future King Charles. It is a wool intarsia-knit with a pattern that includes a lone black sheep among rows of white ones.

The jumper, which was once again unearthed in the attic of one of the Warm & Wonderful founders last spring, is again available for purchase. The item was placed up for auction on September 7 as part of Sotheby's New York's first-ever "Fashion Icons" event, and it will be accessible for bidding through September 14.

The jumper originally sold for around $50 in the 1980s, but Sotheby's predicted it would sell for between $50,000 and $80,000.

With a top bid of $120,000, that amount has already been greatly surpassed. (Only time will tell where the jumper ranks among all of Diana's clothing sales records. The highest price one of her outfits has ever received was $604,800 for her purple Victor Edelstein gown that was auctioned off in January of this year.)

Though Diana ultimately struggled to find a comfortable position within the royal family, many have discovered significance in the "black sheep" style of the sweater's sheep motif. 

The public adored Diana, known as "the People's Princess," for defying the fussy conventions of the institution. However, tales about Diana's struggle to fit in—and the family's refusal to accept her—have contributed just as much to the mythos around Diana as her charitable work and acute sense of style.

The jumper exemplifies for Cynthia Houlton, Global Head of Fashion & Accessories at Sotheby's, why Diana and her differences are still relevant today.

"She's a truly unique person who's remembered for who she was and the work she did—and not just how beautiful she was or what she wore," Houlton says. "When we think of the black-sheep motif, at one point it might have been considered a negative thing to be different from the rest of the flock. But today, it's OK to be unique and to stand out in the crowd. I think she probably had some feelings that she was like that black sheep—very different in the sea of the Royals, who were very much the same."

Following the 1981 polo match, Diana's aide wrote to the Warm & Wonderful company's owners Joanna Osborne and Sally Muir to inform them that the jumper was broken and to ask if it could be fixed or replaced because Diana "like[d][it] very much." The jumper appeared to be significant to Diana.

The broken item was lost in storage until it was found last year in Osborne's attic, folded into an old blanket in a box of similar sweaters. Osborne and Muir decided to replace the item. Its originality was confirmed by a detached cuff, Times magazine reported.

"It was crazy," Osborne says. "We thought we had lost it."

For years, people have admired, imitated, and been almost compulsively fascinated with Diana's style. Diana, who was regarded as the most photographed person in the world when she was alive, was aware of the importance of presentation and used her sense of style to express herself creatively despite the limitations of royal life while also engaging in fashion diplomacy at home and abroad.

After the discomforts of her royal existence had begun to set in, she rewired the jumper (the replacement sent by Muir and Osborne) to another polo match in 1983. This must be interpreted as purposeful. She even dressed it in a more refined—and conscious—manner for the second outing, with a white collar and black ribbon tie completing the ensemble and emphasising the collar.

For Houlton, Diana's decision to wear the sweater again signals that it held particular significance for the princess. "By the time it was 1983, she was very aware," she says. "Because she was followed everywhere and constantly photographed, her choices were very conscious—she used fashion as a way to express who she was."