By Sara Bright
When Kim Kardashian stepped onto the red carpet at the 2024 LACMA Art+Film Gala in Los Angeles on 2 November, she was wearing something no one had seen in public since 1997. The Attallah Cross – a bold, square-cut amethyst and diamond pendant made by Garrard in the 1920s, once loaned to Princess Diana for a London charity gala – hung from a shortened pearl chain against the plunging neckline of a custom white Gucci gown. It was the first time the piece had been worn in nearly three decades, and it immediately ignited a conversation that goes beyond fashion: who has the right to handle cultural artefacts, and what happens when private collection enters the arena of public spectacle?
Kardashian purchased the pendant at Sotheby’s in January 2023 for £163,800 – roughly double its pre-sale estimate – and kept it in her archive for almost two years before wearing it publicly. The LACMA gala, which raised a record $6.4 million and honoured sculptor Simone Leigh and filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, was the stage she chose. In a room alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Blake Lively, Anna Wintour, and Charli XCX, the cross became the evening’s most talked-about accessory – and the centre of a debate about whether celebrities should be the custodians of objects that carry the weight of public memory.
The Attallah Cross: A Century of Provenance
Created by Garrard – the London jeweller appointed as the first official Crown Jeweller in 1843, a position it held for over 160 years until 2007 – the cross is described in Sotheby’s catalogue as a “Fleurée cross set with square-cut amethyst and accented by circular-cut diamonds.” The diamonds weigh approximately 5.25 carats; the cross measures 5.4 inches by 3.7 inches. It was likely a special commission, possibly a replica of a historical Renaissance-era piece, according to Kristian Spofforth, head of jewellery at Sotheby’s London.
In the 1980s, the pendant was acquired by Naim Attallah CBE, the Palestinian-British businessman who served as joint managing director and later group chief executive of Asprey & Garrard. Attallah was a close friend of Princess Diana and lent her the cross on several occasions. The most celebrated was at a 1987 charity gala for Birthright – now Wellbeing of Women – held at Garrard’s premises on Regent Street. Diana wore the pendant on a long pearl chain, paired with a purple velvet Catherine Walker gown and diamond and pearl drop earrings gifted by the Emir of Qatar. The ensemble was theatrical, regal, and unmistakably hers.
What makes the Attallah Cross significant, beyond its aesthetics, is what it represented in Diana’s evolving personal style. As Sotheby’s noted, the pendant is “symbolic of the princess’s growing self-assurance in her sartorial and jewellery choices, at that particular moment in her life.” By the late 1980s, Diana was asserting her independence, and the bold cross signalled a departure from her earlier, more conventional royal wardrobe. Jewellery historian Vivienne Becker described it as worn “with a mix of seriousness and playfulness, and more than a nod to fashion as armour.”
After Diana’s death in 1997, the cross remained with the Attallah family. Naim Attallah died in February 2021, and his estate consigned the piece to Sotheby’s. It had never been worn by anyone other than Diana. When it appeared in the Royal & Noble auction on 18 January 2023, four bidders competed for it over five minutes. Kardashian won.
The Collector’s Archive: Kardashian as Cultural Custodian
The Attallah Cross is not an isolated acquisition. Over the past decade, Kardashian has assembled what amounts to a private museum of pop culture relics. In 2011, she purchased three gold and jade Lorraine Schwartz bangles that had belonged to Elizabeth Taylor for $64,900. “Elizabeth Taylor is iconic,” Kardashian told the press. In 2017, she bought Jackie Kennedy’s Cartier Tank watch at Christie’s for $379,500. In 2019, she and Kanye West purchased a velvet jacket worn by Michael Jackson to Elizabeth Taylor’s 65th birthday party for their daughter North, along with Jackson’s white fedora from the “Smooth Criminal” video. And there was the 2022 Met Gala, when Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s iconic Jean Louis dress – the gown in which Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy in 1962 – after losing 16 pounds to fit into it. The dress was loaned by Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, which had acquired it at auction in 2016 for $4.81 million.
Taken together, these acquisitions form a pattern. Kardashian is not merely buying expensive jewellery; she is curating a collection of objects that carry associative power – the kind that comes from their connection to specific women, specific moments, and specific cultural narratives. By positioning herself as a steward of these objects, she aligns herself with a tradition of aristocratic collecting now enacted through the mechanisms of celebrity and auction commerce. She is not a museum; she does not display these items behind glass. She wears them – and in wearing them, she recontextualises them.
The Ethics of Recontextualisation
This is where the controversy begins. When Kardashian wore the Attallah Cross at the LACMA gala, the internet reacted immediately. Some praised the styling: the cross, paired with a six-strand pearl choker and a Bvlgari pearl and diamond necklace, created a layered, maximalist look that echoed Diana’s own fondness for pearls while feeling distinctly contemporary. Others objected. “Why are we letting Kim Kardashian wear Diana’s necklace,” wrote one commenter on Instagram, articulating a sentiment that was widely shared.
The criticism falls into several categories. First, there is the question of provenance and respect: does wearing a piece of jewellery associated with a beloved public figure risk trivialising her legacy? The Attallah Cross was deeply connected to Diana’s humanitarian work – it was worn at a charity gala, in a context of philanthropic purpose – and placing it on a red carpet designed to promote a fashion brand and a museum fundraiser shifts its meaning. Diana wore the cross with a Catherine Walker gown she had commissioned for the occasion; Kardashian wore it with a plunging Gucci dress chosen to showcase the jewellery rather than to honour its history.
Second, there is the issue of privilege and access. These objects enter the market through auction houses that serve wealthy private collectors. When a piece with significant cultural provenance is purchased by a celebrity, it becomes part of her personal archive – available for public viewing only on her terms, and only when she chooses to wear it. The Victoria & Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other institutions regularly acquire historical fashion and jewellery at auction, making it accessible to the public in a curated, educational context. Kardashian’s collection is a different model entirely: private, performative, and contingent on her editorial decisions.
Third, there is the question of whether the act of wearing these objects preserves or diminishes them. Proponents argue that Kardashian’s visibility introduces these artefacts to new audiences. The Attallah Cross, which had not been seen publicly since 1997, became the subject of global press coverage when she wore it. Critics counter that this “new lease of life” is conditional: it depends on the continued cultural relevance of the wearer, and it strips the object of the context that gave it meaning.
The Auction House as Cultural Gatekeeper
The rise of celebrity archival collecting has transformed the auction industry. Houses like Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Bonhams now market fashion and jewellery not just as luxury goods but as cultural artefacts with narrative value. The Attallah Cross was sold as part of Sotheby’s “Royal & Noble” sale, a category that explicitly trades on provenance and association. This market dynamic creates a feedback loop: auction houses generate press coverage by attaching famous names to lots; celebrities acquire the lots and generate further coverage by wearing them; the increased visibility drives up the value of similar items in future sales.
When Kardashian wore Monroe’s dress to the Met Gala in 2022, some commentators argued the exposure could triple the dress’s value. “That dress would now sell for $10 million because of that double whammy connection of a celebrity,” one auction specialist told CNN.
What the Trend Reveals About Contemporary Culture
The Kardashian-Diana crossover is a lens through which to examine a broader cultural phenomenon: the collapse of the boundary between private collection and public performance. In an era when every outfit is photographed, analysed, and circulated on social media within minutes, wearing a historical artefact is never a neutral act. It is a statement about identity, power, and the ownership of narrative.
Kardashian’s collection functions as a kind of biography through objects. By acquiring pieces from Diana, Taylor, Monroe, and Jackson, she inserts herself into a lineage of women who were scrutinised, desired, and mythologised – women whose jewellery and clothing became part of their public personas. The act of wearing these items is both an homage and a claim: an assertion that Kardashian belongs in the same cultural conversation as the women whose relics she now possesses.
Whether this constitutes preservation or appropriation depends on one’s perspective. What is clear is that the trend shows no signs of slowing. Auction houses are expanding their fashion and jewellery categories; celebrities are building increasingly elaborate archives; and the public is consuming these moments as content, debating them in real time, and then moving on. The Attallah Cross, which once signalled Diana’s self-assurance, now signifies something else entirely: the commodification of nostalgia, the celebrity as curator, and the enduring power of objects to carry meaning – even when that meaning is contested.
As our recent coverage of Diana’s revenge gown demonstrated, Diana understood perhaps better than anyone that clothing and jewellery are not passive adornments but active instruments of self-definition. The question now is whether that same agency survives the transfer from private royal collection to celebrity archive. The intersection of art and fashion has always been fraught with questions of ownership and meaning; Kardashian’s acquisition of the Attallah Cross merely sharpens them.
The cross remains in Kardashian’s archive. Whether she wears it again, or whether it disappears from public view for another generation, is a question that only she can answer. But the conversation it has started – about who gets to handle history, and what happens when they do – is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.
