How Princess Diana rewrote the rules of royal dressing
It was 36 years ago today (Feb 24) that Lady Diana Spencer stepped onto the world stage as a shy 19 year-old teenager, clinging to the arm of Prince Charles as they announced their engagement. For that momentous occasion — one that propelled her to become one of the most famous women in the world, almost overnight — Diana had popped to Harrods to pick up a cobalt blue skirt suit by the little-known British label Cojana, which co-ordinated with her sapphire and diamond engagement ring.
Whilst that outfit chimed with the romantic, polite look of the day, it offered little hint of the glamorous, agenda-setting style icon Princess Diana would soon become, rewriting the rules of royal fashion along her way. That remarkable trajectory is charted in a new exhibition, Diana: Her Fashion Story, which opened last month at her former home, Kensington Palace.
The 25-dress retrospective offers a masterclass in Diana’s transformation and gives remarkable insight into the Princess’s clever realisation that clothes were one of her most powerful mediums to connect with the world.
“Although she didn’t want to be known as a clothes horse, she learnt how to use fashion to help her do the job to hand,” explains curator Eleri Lynn. “She crafted her public image carefully, and used it to engage and inspire.” Lynn recalls how Diana often said to the designer David Sassoon when perusing possible outfits, “What message will I be giving off with this?”
Anna Harvey, the former Vogue fashion editor who was Diana’s stylist throughout her public life, explains that one of Diana’s first acts as a Princess was to banish the royal convention of wearing gloves. “I’d ordered dozens of pairs in every possible shape and size,” Harvey remembers. “The royal family all wore gloves all the time but she just couldn’t be bothered.”
Diana’s no-gloves mantra wasn’t just a sartorial preference, though — rather a prime example of the way she preferred to truly connect with those she was meeting. In some contexts, that decision carried gamechanging influence, such as when she visited an AIDS hospice in Canada in 1991 and was photographed shaking hands with one of the patients — the simplest of gestures which helped to break down one of the great stigmas of the day.
Indeed, Diana went on to deliberately construct what she called a ‘caring wardrobe’ of brightly patterned dresses and jangling jewels for patients and children to enjoy
walks to a reception at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park June 28, 1994.
and play with when she visited. “She would never wear a hat to a hospital, because she said you couldn’t cuddle a child with a hat on,” remembers the milliner Phillip Somerville.
Soon the fashion industry were noticing Diana’s experimental yet carefully considered approach. “Within a year of her wedding, she had ousted the stiff formality of taffeta and tiaras, and banished from her wardrobe the formulaic Royal “occasion wear” which matched shapeless pastel suits to hats, shoes and handbags,” wrote The Daily Telegraph’s former fashion editor Hilary Alexander in 1997.
The Princess’s most famous fashion moments came in the latter-half of the 1980s when she was dubbed “Dynasty Di”, opting for glitzy gowns with graceful silhouettes which brought a new elegance and frisson to royal dressing. “She soon found that certain shapes really did her credit. She knew she had amazing legs and a body for long, slim dresses,” Harvey says.
The exhibition includes the midnight blue velvet, off-shoulder dress by Victor Edelestein which Diana she chose for the State Dinner at the White House in 1985 where she danced with John Travolta. With its fishtail skirt and delicate ruching, the look captured the meeting of royalty and celebrity perfectly while Harvey and the Princess’s decision to pair it with navy instead of the customary white evening gloves prompted a rapturous reception.
Diana was also the first royal who dared to sport trousers for an evening engagement. In 1986, she attended a concert in Vancouver where Bryan Adams was to perform, choosing a black cropped jacket and tailored jodhpurs by Jasper Conran — a look which would be as noteworthy now as it was then. In 1985, the Princess even subverted the royal jewellery collection by wearing an emerald choker which had been gifted to her by The Queen as a headband.
Catherine Walker became Diana’s go-to couturier, and each of her creations exemplifies the unique detailing which the Princess’s take on royal dressing required. The exhibition’s curators point out that many of her dresses have longer than usual slits at the back, so that Diana could bend or kneel to speak to children or anyone in a wheelchair.
A consciousness of the camera runs through many of Diana’s looks. Walker would include embroidery on the back as well as the front of her designs so that they were striking from every angle. Often, this embroidery was diplomatic as well as decorative such as the pearls — an Asian symbol of luck and fertility — encrusted on the ‘Elvis’ dress which she wore in Hong Kong or falcons which were beaded onto a sweeping cream silk crepe design for a visit to Saudi Arabia, where those birds are a treasured part of the country’s heritage.
The exhibition underscores how a look can transform when it is photographed; a beautifully embellished, floral printed shift dress from 1997 looks deceptively simple in the images of Diana wearing it as she arrives at the Christie’s auction of her gowns which raised £3.4 million for charity.
“She was an expert in the language of clothes,” Lynn reflects. From an acute emotional awareness to a savvy understanding of the power of glamour, Diana’s fashion fluency remains enduring and unrivalled.
The show is open from February 2017 until 2018.