Every piece of jewelry tells a story—and in the case of Princess Diana’s Swan Lake Suite of jewelry, it’s a tragic one.

In what would become one of her final public appearances in the summer of 1997, the former Princess of Wales attended the British National Ballet’s performance of Swan Lake on June 3, 1997. Wearing one of designer Jacques Azagury’s “Famous Five” dresses—this one in ice blue—Diana wore a stunning necklace that Vanity Fair called “one of the most symbolic pieces in Diana’s entire collection.”

The necklace, designed by royal favorite Garrard, was part of an unfinished set, according to the outlet. After the ballet at Royal Albert Hall, Diana returned the necklace to Garrard so that the jeweler could craft a pair of matching earrings. Before she could receive them, she was killed in a Paris car crash on August 31 of that year.

The earrings Diana never got to wear are a matching pair of two South Sea Pearls; the necklace, Vanity Fair reported, is made up of 178 diamonds totaling about 52 carats and another seven South Sea cultured pearls. After Diana’s death, much of her jewelry was inherited by her sons Prince William and Prince Harry, but the Swan Lake Suite never officially became part of Diana’s private collection, so it was sold in 1999 for $1 million. In 2008, it sold again through a private sale, and the suite was due to come up for auction again in June 2023 before the sale was cancelled “at the last minute after the collection found a private buyer,” according to Vanity Fair. WWD reported that, had the suite actually gone to auction, its estimated value was between $3 million to $5 million, with the caveat that “the set could fetch much more.”

While it has been reported that the set was acquired by a museum, neither the museum’s name nor the price of the sale were ever disclosed. “Few know what really happened to the Swan Lake Suite and who possesses it today,” Vanity Fair reported.

At her June 3 appearance at the ballet, Diana wore a beaded minidress by Azagury and satin Jimmy Choo pumps. When Azagury created the dress, “Diana was really at her best, as I had never seen her up to that time,” he told Vanity Fair. “We chose an ice blue, almost exactly the color of her eyes, and it looked great with her lightly tanned skin and blonde hair. The main details of this simple dress are the deep square neckline with bows and its length well above the knee. It obviously caused a sensation.”

Diana had finalized her divorce from Prince Charles on August 28, 1996, and since her 1992 separation from him—and particularly after the divorce—her hemlines were getting shorter and shorter. “The only real issue we discussed was the length of her skirts,” Azagury said. “The princess always wanted to shorten them, but as you can see from the Swan Lake dress, they were already quite short. Although a former Princess of Wales, she was still a royal.”

Speaking on Hello!’s “A Right Royal Podcast,” Azagury said that, with the Swan Lake dress in particular, Diana “even wanted to go shorter than that on the dress. And we [Azagury and Diana’s butler Paul Burrell] said, ‘Well, look, there’s not much dress at the top, there’s not much dress at the bottom. You’ll end up with nothing in between.’”

Azagury described the princess as “one of the most caring people I knew, and despite her busy schedule,

she always made time for everyone. She was very funny and we had great laughs together.”

“I must say that whenever I met her she always seemed very happy, especially in the last few months,” he told Vanity Fair.

He added,

“I don’t think we will see another Diana for a long time, if ever. She was really a phenomenon.”