Wednesday evening's Elizabeth Taylor haute couture auction marked the second evening in a row that perfectly-coiffed women in heavy furs filed into the large salesroom at Christie's Rockefeller Center headquarters to genteely skirmish for pieces of the Hollywood legend's estate. The 67-lot sale of vintage fashion came to a grand total of $2.6 million, with 100 percent of the offerings sold — a rare event known as a "white-glove sale," appropriately enough. The total was mostly driven by motivated bidders online and over the phones coming from all over the United States, Europe, and Asia.
The stylish sale came on the heels of Tuesday evening's blockbuster $115.9 million auction of Taylor's most prized jewelry — also 100 percent sold — and the impressive $21.3 million day sale of the remainder of the jewelry collection, when a 15-minute bidding war resulted in the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton wedding bands selling for just over $1 million on a $4,000-6,000 estimate. The total for the three sales thus far comes to $139.8 million, and the estate is not finished yet, with three more auctions unfolding over the next two days plus the ongoing online auction on the auction house's Web site. Pre-sale estimates listed by Christie's have been meaningless over the last two days as deep-pocketed fans scramble to own something — anything — that bears the Taylor provenance.
As the evening began, Christie's announced that the Irene Sharaff-designed yellow chiffon wedding dress hearalded as the evening's most valuable offering — from the first of Taylor's two marriages to Burton, her "Cleopatra" co-star — would not be for sale. Instead, the estate decided to donate it to a major American institution, which was not named. The second wedding dress from her Burton marriages, a Gina Fratini gown worn when she married Burton in Botswana in 1975, sold for $62,500 to a phone bidder (est. $10,000-12,000).
With the wedding dress off the table, the top lot at the fashion auction was not a wearable item at all, but a lithograph from Andy Warhol's famed "Liz" series. "Liz (Feldman and Schellmann II.7)," which features the actress's face with bright blue eyes against a red background, was one of an edition of 300 and personally addressed from Warhol "to elizabeth with much love." Though the estimate was $30,000-50,000, the hammer didn't come down until the price was more than 10 times that figure, when an Asian buyer on the phone finally won the print for $662,500 after a drawn-out war with a determined bidder sitting in the front row.
After the lithograph, the most expensive item of the evening was a Christian Dior evening gown and matching bag from the designer's 1968 spring-summer collection. Taylor wore the gown to the annual ball put on by Guy de Rothschild and his wife at their country home in France. Bids instantly jumped over the $4,000-6,000 estimate, and eventually the dress was purchased over the phone by an unnamed American museum for $362,500.
One of the only successful bidders sitting in front of the auctioneer was a determined woman in the second row sporting a black felt hat. She battled with bidders on the phone and online, eventually winning a Gianfranco Ferre lavender embroidered silk trouser suit — which came with matching shoes, hat, and Prada handbag — for $40,000. Buttonholed after the sale, the buyer identified herself only as "Karen from Texas," telling ARTINFO that it was an impulse purchase — she just happened to be in town and decided to come to both evening auctions after viewing the sale preview on Sunday.
Though the frenzy in the saleroom was more demure Wednesday than at the packed jewelry auction on Tuesday, it was far from unexciting. At one point near the end, four hours into the bidding, someone in a group near the front of the mostly empty room decided to ignore New York's draconian ban on smoking indoors and lit up a cigarette, taking at least one drag before being forced to put it out.