So good they made it twice: late Princess’s black sheep jumper copied for The Crown
THE black sheep jumper is one of the most famous items ever worn by Diana, Princess of Wales and was widely interpreted as a playful nod to her feelings of a Royal family outsider, long before any Panorama interview or Andrew Morton book.
So pivotal was the sweater, which featured one black sheep amid a repeating pattern of white sheep, that it was recreated for Season 4 of The Crown, released on Netflix yesterday. Seen only for a brief moment on actress Emma Corrin in scenes showing Diana bored and alone at Buckingham Palace as she awaits her wedding to Prince Charles.
The Daily Telegraph can now disclose that the Princess loved her novelty knit so much that, when she tore a hole in the first sweater, seen at a polo match in 1980, she asked its designers to repair it. Instead, they decided to make her an entirely new one.
“She damaged the first one, we always imagined her enormous engagement ring caught in the threads,” Sally Muir, co-founder of Eighties knitwear label Warm and Wonderful, told The Daily Telegraph.
“It was sent back to us with a very charming letter from her secretary, saying how much she loved it and could we mend it. We decided that rather than cobble together the damaged one, we’d make her a perfect new one, which is what we did. Hence the two.”
Diana was later photographed wearing her black sheep jumper again at the Guards Polo Club in Windsor in 1983, where she styled it with white jeans and a white shirt with a black ribbon tied in a bow around her neck.
The possibility that the Princess might own two versions of her beloved jumper emerged earlier this week, when an extract from a new book on royal fashion was published by VanityFair.com. Elizabeth Holmes, author of HRH: So Many Thoughts on Royal Style, noted that the black sheep’s nose points to Diana’s left on the first garment and to the right on the second.
It’s a detail which “hardly anybody else has ever noticed”, says Muir.