The Most Expensive Dresses Members Of The Royal Family Have Worn At Events

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Royal fashion works by its own playbook, and it looks nothing like Hollywood's. For one thing, royals don't work the red carpet as often as actors do. There's no awards-season circuit or stylist teams competing with one another for the trendiest look. There's no Met Gala invitation, and there certainly isn't an annual front-row seat at couture shows. Most of the public engagements royals attend call for a more casual wardrobe. Sometimes, their style is pretty out-there: You've likely come across the times royal fashion got weird, or the most infamous fashion flops in royal family history.

However, royals walk the occasional red carpet of a movie premiere, or attend a charity gala or a state dinner, dressed to the nines. The scarcity allows each high-end look to carry more weight. In fact, royals have presided over fashion moments that still live in the public memory years or decades later, and some were footed at a price that would make your eyes water. Below, we go through these expensive looks and their prices, describing the original cost and the sum when adjusted for inflation. Some of these gowns are instantly recognizable, and they all would likely break the bank for anyone not in the royal family.

The "revenge dress" that Princess Diana wore to the Serpentine Gallery on June 29, 1994, the same night then-Prince Charles' admission of infidelity aired on national television, is one of the most iconic fashion moments of all time. Everything from the bare-shoulder cut to the figure-hugging silhouette and the short hemline undermined royal convention, and history recorded it. She'd reportedly bought the dress for £900 in 1991, roughly $1,600 in 1991 money — or some $3,900 in 2026, as of writing. It was sold to charity in 1997 for £39,098, or around $65,000 at the time. In 2026, it returned to the famed auction house Sotheby's with a projected price tag of up to $300,000 ahead of its December 2026 auction, turning it into one of the most expensive dresses worn by royalty in history.

One of the most expensive dresses of the modern royal era belongs to a diplomatic evening in 2019, when Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, attended a reception at the British ambassador's Rabat residence during her tour of Morocco. She was pregnant with her first child, and wore a custom Christian Dior gown in draped, cream-colored satin. The hem was finished with fine beadwork, and overall, it carried a look of nonchalant extravagance. Custom dresses like these rarely come with a listed price. Still, reports put this as high as about £60,000, or about $100,000 adjusted for inflation as of writing, which is an egregious sum even by royal standards. At least that's according to royal expert Robert Jobson, who claimed in his book "The Windsor Legacy" that the expense had irked the queen (via Woman & Home).

Another expensive Meghan Markle outfit that turned heads also came from the period when she was pregnant with her first child during the royal tour in 2018. That October, she was photographed at the Australian Geographic Society Awards in Sydney wearing an Oscar de la Renta gown, in black and white and covered with bird silhouettes all over. The unique design immediately stood out, and it was a fitting choice, too, for a night celebrating conservation. The price was reported at about $13,000, which is around $17,000 as of writing, going down as one of the most expensive outfits Meghan Markle has ever worn.

The BAFTAs are about as close as British royals get to dressing up for a proper awards-show red carpet. At the 2017 ceremony, Catherine, Princess of Wales arrived in an Alexander McQueen gown, priced around $7,700 according to the reports at the time, or about $10,500 as of writing. The white florals adorning it were elegant, and the daring bare-shoulder cut drew attention in its own right. Royal dress protocol favors more conservative necklines, but this was among the times Kate Middleton ignored it. She's known for getting more than one wear out of a look, so in 2019, she brought the gown back for the National Portrait Gallery Gala. Only this time, it was reworked with sleeves in place of the bare shoulders.

Another one of Catherine, Princess of Wales' expensive outings came during the 2022 Caribbean tour, when she wore a custom Phillipa Lepley to a Baha Mar reception. The deep-V design reportedly cost some £6,000, or around $7,400 at the time, which is just shy of $8,500 as of writing. Combined with the jewelry and heels, the full ensemble would be much higher, which is why it remains, to this day, among the dresses worn by Kate Middleton that had a massive price tag.

The London premiere of "No Time to Die" in 2021 was a special occasion on numerous counts, not least of which because of Catherine, Princess of Wales' striking Jenny Packham outfit. Jenny Packham is the name behind some of Kate Middleton's biggest nights, not to mention her costliest.

For this event, the princess wore a gold sequined gown from the designer, finished with a trailing cape. It reportedly bore a $5,500 price tag (which, as of writing, is almost $7,000), and seemingly paid tribute to the dress William, Prince of Wales' mother had worn to the premiere of another Bond movie, "A View to a Kill," in 1985. It closely echoed not just the other outfit's neckline, but also the bodice and skirt design, as well as the see-through shimmer around the ankles. Whether or not the homage was deliberate, royal watchers spotted the similarities in an instant.

Next to the five-figure gowns, some of the outfits on this list may appear downright modest. Though when it comes to royals, "modest" is very relative. For the 2017 Royal Variety Performance, Catherine, Princess of Wales turned up in another Jenny Packham dress — a powder-blue gown smothered in sparkling embellishments — and it carried a reported price tag of around $4,700, or about $6,400 as of writing. In the world of expensive couture designs, Kate Middleton's outfits land somewhere in the middle ground.