Her Princess Diana collection is built on manifestation. And a few re-mortgages
By Leah Dolan, CNN
(CNN) — Renae Plant and her husband Livinio Stuyck were about to become restaurant investors. A local pizza place in their Los Angeles neighborhood had approached the couple, offering them the opportunity to own a small stake. It made sense: Plant and Stuyck had a nest egg already saved and some comparable experience in business; Plant has been the director and owner of the local Camelot Kids Preschool since 2008. “And then my best friend Kevin says, ‘Hey Renae, six of Diana’s dresses are at Julien’s,’” an auction house. “’You want to come have a look?’” she says with a wry eyebrow raise over video call.
Twelve years and more than 800 dresses, accessories and objects later, Plant believes she has cultivated one of the largest private collections of Princess Diana’s personal belongings in the world. “That was a miracle,” she said. “Because any day later and that would have gone in a different direction.”
This sense of divine intervention has followed Plant throughout her life. Her first brush with the late Princess of Wales was in 1983 while on a school trip to a ginger factory in Queensland, Australia. “I was beside myself, because I’d fallen in love with her when she got married, and the fairy tale,” she said. “Every girl’s dream was to marry a prince, back in the day.” But Plant, then just one of many 12-year-old schoolgirls waiting in line to meet Diana during her royal visit, got more than the standard handshake.
After slipping away from her classmates and following Diana under a barricade, she realized the princess had dropped something: a small, palm-sized clay platypus. A kindly policeman told her it was fated. Since then, Plant has needed no further encouragement, dedicating much of her life to Princess Diana’s memory. “I look back on that platypus moment and it was almost like it was meant to be,” she said. In 2018, she set up The Princess & The Platypus Foundation; a registered non-profit that supports charities aligned with the kind of philanthropic work Diana carried out while alive. “It’s my job to protect her life and legacy, and to share it with the world,” Plant said.
Part of that mission is consolidating as many of the princess’ possessions as possible. “I felt like all of Diana’s pieces were just being scattered aimlessly all around the world,” she said. Plant in the past has bid against, and beat, the Historic Royal Palaces charity in London, who alongside managing unoccupied royal palaces in the UK also conserve and display royal ceremonial dress. She has also lent them dresses.
Plant believes luck, manifestation or something larger, has helped build her impressive vault. Take last year, when she bought the “caring dress” –– the vivid floral Belville Sassoon frock Diana often wore to brighten up visits to children’s hospitals –– for $520,000 at auction. Plant was surprised that the signature dress, something she saw Diana wear in person in 1988, didn’t sell for more money. “The universe was out there,” she said. Her assigned bidder’s number was 333, “an Angel number. She was definitely looking down over me. And some internet thing happened.” She recalls a network issue meaning the underbidder couldn’t match her at the crucial moment. When she realized she’d won, Plant made the news when she was filmed collapsing with joy. “It’s a nerve-wracking situation,” she said. “I get shaky.”
The rest of her success as a Lady Di collector can be attributed to more tangible personal sacrifices. “My husband is a very loving man, because he lets us take the mortgage out against our home every now and again,” she said. They re-mortgaged in 2015, when Plant had her heart set on Diana’s studded Atelier Versace gown which she bought at auction for $200,000, and again in 2025. That extra line of equity last summer meant Plant could pick up the Belleville Sassoon dress, and another 34 items including a peach-colored ostrich feather hat Diana wore on her honeymoon which Plant bought for $26,000. The couple spent around $1.9 million that day. (In general, Plant prefers not to focus on the monetary value of her pieces and refused to give a total estimate of the collection.)
But while her husband Stuyck is a benevolent financier, Plant maintains he is a terrible underbidder. She’s still sore about the 1981 Warm & Wonderful black sheep sweater she lost out on due to letting Stuyck press the buttons. It sold for a record-breaking $1.14 million. “I should never let my husband bid,” she said, and laughed. Thankfully, Diana had two of the sheep knits made — and Plant got her hands on the second one.
When we talk, she is preparing for her very first exhibition, “The Princess Diana: Love, Life and Legacy — A Life of Giving,” opening at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum on Saturday. To fill the three-act showcase, tracing Diana’s life from childhood up to her untimely death in 1997, Plant has emptied out her entire collection. There will be personal letters, Diana’s baby dresses, the tape recorders she made voice memos on, her favorite childhood records (ABBA, Queen and Elton John, if you’re curious) and of course, her many, many gowns.
Almost everything on show, from Diana’s enormous taffeta “spare” wedding dress to the embellished black Jacques Azagury evening gown she wore to her 36th birthday party, belongs to Plant. The exception is a certain velvet gown Diana wore while being twirled on the dance floor by John Travolta during President Reagan’s White House dinner in 1985. That is rented. “It’s the only piece we’re loaning,” she said. “It’s going to steal the thunder!” Diana’s off-the-shoulder mermaid tale gown will be displayed alongside Nancy Reagan’s ivory James Galanos dress.
Her day job as a director of a local preschool means the agony and ecstasy of six figure bidding wars happens largely after Plant has clocked off. “I put in a whole day at my preschool, and then I come home at night and do it on the weekends,” she said. The couple also pay out of pocket for a monthly subscription to store and preserve the pieces in climate-controlled facilities, which charge per item.
Plant currently catalogues her collection in an online museum accessible to paid members. The high financial stakes might put others off, but something elusive keeps Plant going. “What I’m doing is higher than me. I’m a vessel. I’m channeling,” she said. “It’s an energetic thing for me. I don’t even know how I could do it. I don’t even know how things have ended up this way, but they have.”
On December 5, exactly 12 years to the day Plant bought her first dress worn by Diana, another gown is set to go on auction. The “revenge dress,” that show-stopping Christina Stambolian gown that launched a thousand superlatives: the princess’ sexiest, most famous, most rebellious outfit. Sotheby’s New York has set a price estimate of $300,000. “I can’t afford that,” Plant said. “I’ve already tapped my mortgage out for a while. It’s sad. My thing is to really put all these pieces back together, so it does break my heart when I’m not able to.”
Instead, the Reagan Library will be the first to publicly unveil another dress from Plant’s collection with a similar post-divorce vim. It has many of the same design features of Stambolian’s frock, a sensual sweetheart neckline in a color previously off-limits to royals: black. (Official dress codes mandate that black is restricted to periods of mourning — when Diana was no longer part of the royal family, LBD’s were back on the menu.)
Designed by Azagury, this dress was perhaps the last Diana ever commissioned. The late princess had six fittings in total for the gown, including one just days before her death in August 1997. She never got to wear the finished product. “The pins are still in the back of that dress,” said Plant. “It’s a beautiful finale, so to speak.”
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