DIANA PULLOUT
Court shoes, cone heels, evening pumps, slip- ons, loafers: the sheer number of shoes Diana wore as Princess of Wales could almost have rivalled Imelda Marcos.
When we look at it today, we can see exactly how Diana’s shoe choices traced all the ups and downs of the story of her life — especially when it came to her romance with Charles.
Step by step, from the moment she stood next to her fiance in the garden of Buckingham Palace, head held blushingly on one side in a self-conscious effort to look shorter, right through to being an elegant woman who walked tall — ‘6ft 3in in high heels’, as designer Bruce oldfield put it — it’s all there.
Her changing styles also mirror the rise of the shoe designer in fashion. Indeed, we’ve now reached a point at which designers such as Alessandro Michele, creative director at Gucci, are avidly referencing everything the young Diana wore in the early Eighties. Even her gawky early ‘ royal appearance’ footwear has become retrospectively fashionable.
In her ‘Shy Di’ years, Diana ordered pair after pair of low-heeled court shoes in a rainbow of colours to match every conceivable outfit. She was careful never to overstep the heel height mark. Jimmy Choo remembers that when he first knew Diana, she ordered heels at ‘two inches only, no higher than that’.
they were pointed, with a V-cut, and became what she called ‘my regular shoe’. Her shoe size, incidentally, is thought to have been six-and-a-half.
only gradually did the hemlines go up, the skirts narrow and the heels start to rise. In the last two years of her life, her marriage behind her, she entered her super-groomed phase of elegant, strappy slingbacks. there were no tights, just tanned legs, and she was long past caring about giving the impression of being shorter.
She laughed when Jimmy Choo warned that a pair of four-inch evening heels might be difficult to move in.
‘I won’t be going out walking here and there,’ she said. ‘I want to be taller than the men.’