This Side Up dress

The This Side Up dress was a costume Andy Warhol made for the Dalton twins in the 1960s. Its appearance in a 1980 Sotheby's auction became a small but pointed episode in the diary: a piece of Warhol's earlier work entered the market not as an identified creation by him, but as one item among other clothes, and its final price fell between his wildly different estimates of its worth.

Origin and Auction

On July 30, 1980, Warhol noted that Sotheby's was holding a costume auction and that the dress was included. The auction house had placed it with the other clothes without realizing he had made it. Warhol contrasted that unremarked presentation with what he believed proper recognition could have meant: framed, the dress might have sold for $10,000. Instead, he expected it to go for $25, and noted that it was the final item in the sale.

The diary later recorded a result that met neither estimate: the This Side Up dress sold for $450. The gap between the imagined framed value and the low expected price makes the sale more than a note of an auction result. Recognition and presentation were part of the object's perceived value, yet the actual price landed between Warhol's two forecasts.

Clothing, Recognition, and Value

The auction's failure to identify Warhol as the dress's maker is central to the episode. Its status depended in part on whether it was seen as an authored costume or merely grouped with other clothing. Warhol's hypothetical $10,000 valuation hinged on putting it in a frame, a change in presentation that would have made its artistic authorship legible; without that framing, he anticipated almost no interest. The $450 sale complicates that expectation without erasing the distinction he drew between the dress as clothing and the dress as recognized work.

Warhol's other diary observations show how closely he attended to clothing as a marker of taste and identity. In discussing Bianca Jagger's wardrobe, he judged Halston's clothes against her figure and argued that she needed more of a costume. He also noticed the return of camp at a 1978 Superman-shop opening, while in 1981 he recorded wearing leftover clothes from Jed Johnson and adopting a closely cropped hairstyle. These observations do not describe the This Side Up dress itself, but they place its auction in a world where clothes could register as fashion, performance, or authored design—and where how an item was presented affected how it was read.