MAKING OF THE LADY DI LOOK
THE one classic style that Princess Diana truly made her own was the frilly, romantic collar.
in the popular imagination, it’s the essence of the ‘ Lady Di’ look, from the simple pie-crust blouse to the more elaborate Cavalier and Puritan necklines, through sailor collars, ruffles and frothy lace trimmings.
and today, it’s exactly those frills and flounces that are sweeping through fashion once again — the obsession of designers high and low, cool girls, teenagers and High Street brands alike.
See a flouncy blouse and big, puffy sleeves in any store or on the street this summer, and a collective nostalgia for Diana’s awkwardly charming years as a young princess exists somewhere behind it.
Today’s fashion students would faint with admiration, for example, at this photograph of Diana wearing a balloon- sleeved white-andblack printed Jan Vanvelden blouse at a polo match in 1983.
Ditto the paparazzi shot of 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer running along the street from her shared flat in Coleherne Court, West London, in 1980, when she was Prince Charles’s suspected girlfriend. at that time, she wore a
top-to-toe principal boy look: a white pie-crust blouse with a narrow black velvet ribbon and frilly cuffs, corduroy knickerbockers and flat pumps. It could step out of a fashion shoot right now.
In 1980, the fashion scene was heavily influenced by New Romantic bands on Top Of The Pops and kids dressing up in do-it-yourself historical foppery at the Blitz club in London’s Covent Garden.
In parallel, style magazines were full of stories about Young Fogeys and Sloane Rangers and their tradition-loving dress codes.
Suddenly, all the British pop- cultural influences of the early Eighties had come together in the coltish shape of the girl who was to become Princess of Wales.
Her frilly shirts were the key to it. The truth was that many of the things Diana chose when she was first married looked pitifully old on a 20-year- old. David Sassoon, of the high- end fashion salon Bellville Sassoon, remembered how she ‘came to us as a shy, young girl — interested in clothes, but with no real idea of what she wanted and needed for her new role’.
Designer Bruce Oldfield made the same point, but more pithily, observing that, at the start, she ‘went off into fashion like a loose cannon’.
Yet there was one point of style on which she was certain — and it didn’t originate with the grown-ups of haute couture. The influence was the other way around.
Diana’s taste for the romantic blouse was something dressmakers could run with, drawing references from the portraits hanging in the royal collections: the Charles I collars depicted by Anthony van Dyck and the billowing sleeves of the mid-19th century German courtiers painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter.
From the first time Diana was glimpsed, through both her pregnancies and her first years as a new mother, collars and sleeves became her trademark.