Diana’s fashion-forward flats
‘THE Princess of Wales is the Eighties Super- Sloane,’ announced The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, published in 1982, the year after she married.
The satirical directory by Ann Barr and Peter York delighted in listing the ways the young Diana exemplified the traditional shopping behaviour of the well-brought-up girl, all the way down to her ‘Rangerette’ casual shoes.
The book called her style ‘New Romantic gone sensible’ — a brilliant summation of her early tastes, including her teaming of flat shoes with knickerbockers (top left).
‘They suit her sporty legs, and now that the fashion is for flat shoes, they look just right,’ wrote Barr and York. The pair added slyly: ‘Although we know why she wore them.’ Flats for the young Diana, in other words, were necessary to prevent her from towering over her new husband.
Later in life, when she wasn’t wearing slinky heels, Diana still adhered to the classic Sloane casual shoe-code.
Even her favourite mid-Eighties cowboy boots (above right) were her personal interpretation of a Sloaney trend much in evidence on the King’s Road at the time.
Mainly, though, her default look drew on the upper-class preference for Gucci loafers and conventional Ferragamo patent pumps with broad, Petersham bows on the toes.
She wore them on hundreds of occasions in private: on polo fields, on outings with the children, dashing to the shops and on her incognito visits to night shelters.
But it is the image of her walking through an area of Red Cross landmine clearance in Angola in 1997 that remains indelible. The fact she was wearing Tod’s loafers (centre) is a footnote, but a telling one. Here was a girl with the most privileged of backgrounds who had become one of the world’s most visible humanitarian campaigners.