Her big bows are still chic
The public first saw Diana officially in a blush-pink ruffled-neck blouse with a satin bow by the emanuels.
She wore it for a portrait shot (above right) by Lord Snowdon, who had been commissioned to shoot 1981’s debutantes for Vogue.
Next, she appeared in a sailorcollared suit with large red bow (above) by Bellville Sassoon, a look she also wore in the official engagement photograph with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
It was an off-the-peg purchase — Sassoon remembers how all Diana’s first buys were hurriedly amassed in an effort to upgrade the basic teenager’s wardrobe she’d been wearing as a flat- sharing kinder- garten assistant. The sailor collar was a classic ingénue look, which, perhaps unconsciously, played to the idea of her as a young bride.
Indeed, whether by accident or design, the sailor collar has longestablished royal associations. It was Queen Victoria who originated the nautical craze for children when she dressed her four-year-old son, Albert edward, the Prince of Wales, in a sailor suit in 1846, a gesture that underlined the monarchy’s patriotic support of the Navy. When he later became King edward VII, he dressed his own children in the same way. By the 1870s, the style had swept the land, with little girls across the nation dressed up in sailor collars, too.
By the early eighties, the memory of that history had long faded — though sailor suits were still the conventional stock-in-trade for middle- class children. For Diana, the sailor collar was just the start. her bows got more exaggerated. Sassoon, for example, made her a black velvet dress for Remembrance Sunday (above) with a white broderie anglaise-edged collar that extended right to her shoulders, trimmed with a black bow.
Wearing it with a three-stranded pearl choker, she looked like a cross between a choirboy and a throwback to the court of Charles I.
Later, post- children, the bow motif continued to pop up in Diana’s wardrobe, but in more sophisticated guises. When she surprised everyone by experimenting with masculine bow ties with a couple of tuxedo suits (an idea originated by Yves Saint Laurent in the Seventies), it became clear she had left her ‘Shy Di’ days behind.
Diana was both influencing and being influenced by the trends of her own generation — but she was also leaving a style legacy that’s particularly visible now.
From Amal Clooney’s Gucci pussy-bow silk crepe de chine dress to the filled yoke that Alexa Chung designed for M&S, the feminine drama of Diana’s trimmings resonates through fashion today.