The dress sold for somewhere near its modest $200-to-$300 estimate, small money by celebrity-auction standards. The plain catalog description undersells what it actually is: a silver metallic spandex halter dress with matching fingerless opera gloves, an inverted pleat sewn into the back, no label, no size tag, built for one specific comic scene in Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult. It came to Julien’s Auctions in September 2024 straight from Raquel Welch’s own estate, part of a wardrobe she kept, rather than returned to a studio, across a screen career that ran more than five decades.

A wardrobe built from the inside out

Julien’s Auctions first opened Welch’s personal collection to the public that April, in a sale the house titled “Bombshell: The Raquel Welch Collection.” It ran more than 450 personally owned lots, costumes, awards, jewelry, and everyday items she’d simply held onto, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, it included pieces by Bob Mackie, Norma Kamali, and Givenchy alongside her 1974 Golden Globe and her Hollywood Walk of Fame plaque. Auction house co-founder Darren Julien said Welch “had it all — grace, glamour, and grit in a goddess’ body,” the kind of line auction houses tend to say about their headline consignors. In this case, the sales figures actually backed it up. The lots ranged far beyond costumes, too: a 2018 Mercedes-Benz SL 550 convertible she’d driven personally, a Rolex, and pieces from Tiffany & Co. all went under the hammer alongside the wardrobe, less a curated exhibit of “Raquel Welch, Movie Star” than an honest cross-section of what one woman actually owned and used across a very long career.

What the market paid for

The April sale brought in $1.08 million across nearly 500 lots, roughly three and a half times its combined high estimate, with all but a handful finding buyers. The single biggest number in the room wasn’t a costume at all. It was a turquoise squash-blossom necklace Welch wore to the 1970 premiere of Myra Breckinridge, estimated at $1,000 and hammered at $195,000. Her bikini costume from the 1967 comedy Bedazzled went for $22,750 against a $500 estimate, and a Bob Mackie beaded gown she wore on The Muppet Show brought $16,250. Even her 1958 La Jolla High School diploma sold, for $3,250. The pattern across nearly every lot ran the same way: people weren’t just paying for a garment. They were paying for proof that it had actually touched her.

The follow-up sale, and the dress itself

That September, Julien’s returned with a second, smaller sale of remaining pieces from the same estate, and it’s where the Naked Gun 33⅓ dress actually crossed the block, sold together with two black-and-white film stills and a candid snapshot of Welch wearing it in her trailer. The 1994 film cast her as Jane Spencer, an aging beauty-pageant figure playing opposite Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling Lieutenant Frank Drebin, comic work a long way tonally from the desert-warrior image she’d spent the 1960s building in films like One Million Years B.C., or the swimsuit photo from that same era that became one of the most reproduced pinup images of the decade. Comedy came later, and on her own terms. Next to the squash-blossom necklace or the Golden Globe, the dress is a small, campy artifact, and that’s rather the point of it. Welch kept it anyway, in whatever closet or storage unit held five decades of a career, right alongside the pieces that had made her famous in the first place.

Most film costumes disappear back into a studio wardrobe department the day shooting wraps, logged, cleaned, and eventually rented out or auctioned off by the studio itself, with the actor who wore them having no more claim to the garment than anyone else on the crew. That Welch had the Naked Gun 33⅓ dress at all, tucked away alongside stills and a candid trailer snapshot documenting exactly when and how she wore it, says something about how she treated her own career: less like a series of jobs she clocked out of, and more like a life she was quietly keeping the receipts for. The two sales together read less like a studio auctioning off props and more like a family finally opening a closet nobody outside it had ever seen the full contents of.

Welch’s estate is proof of the rarer version of a Hollywood career: an actress who held onto her own history, piece by piece, long enough for someone else to eventually put a price on all of it.