LONDON – Almost two decades after Keira Knightley bewitched audiences in the 2007 film, “Atonement,” the emerald-green silk dress she wore in a pivotal scene is coming up for auction. Thanks to its enduring allure, the backless gown designed by Jacqueline Durran is expected to sell for up to £120,000 ($161,000) when it goes under the hammer at Christie’s in London on December 9.  Knightley’s character, Cecilia, wore the dress in a climactic scene in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s tragic romance novel. During the scene, Cecilia makes love with the housekeeper’s son Robbie (played by James McAvoy) in the grand home library after weeks of romantic tension, and they confess their feelings for one another. “When we started making the movie, we all knew it was a pivotal moment, and it had to be a memorable dress,” Durran told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published in 2017.  “Joe (Wright) said that to me, right at the beginning, which was obviously a lot of pressure on me to try and make this memorable dress,” she continued. “But we didn’t know, really. It was a complete surprise how much it did resonate with people and how much it was picked out as a single look from the movie.”  “When the film came out in 2007, I just remember so much about that dress,” Caroline Young, author of the 2022 book “The Color of Fashion: The Story of Clothes in Ten Colors,” told CNN. 

“It’s glamorous, it’s nostalgic, and that green is so significant,” she added.
 “Green has a deep history of representing tempestuous love and illicit affairs,” Young wrote in her book, adding that the “Atonement” gown is “one of the most talked about green dresses in recent years.” “Because that segment of the film was set in the 1930s,” Young told CNN, the dress “has this Jean Harlow-esque quality — the sort of slinkiness of the cut, the thin straps.”
 “It’s this perfect summer before tragedy strikes,” Young added. Wright had various instructions for Durran for the dress design, including that “it should have movement at the hem and be quite full-skirted,” Durran said. He “wanted it as showstopping as we could make it, and that it should be green,” although he “wasn’t specific” about the shade, and “the mood of the dress should be that it could remind the audience that it is the hottest day of the year.” For this reason, Durran said she tried to make the dress from “very fine fabric, and make it very light and unstructured.” She drew on reference books from the 1920s and ‘30s and “pulled out things that I thought would suit Keira.”