What Diana’s power suits really meant
Now Diana puts her wardrobe to work
PULLOUT INSIDE
When Diana Princess of Wales morphed into a power- suited working woman, it was probably the most significant transformation of her life. And yet its symbolism, and the practical effect on her wardrobe, are under-estimated.
‘She had gone from playing a part, to finding a role,’ says Jasper Conran, who made clothes for Diana from the beginning. ‘She turned into a woman who was quite assured in her work.’
eleri Lynn, the curator of the exhibition of Diana’s clothes at Kensington Palace earlier this year, puts it succinctly: ‘After her separation from the Prince of Wales, she wanted to be known as a workhorse rather than a clothes horse.’
The gradual revolution in her day wardrobe can be dated back to 1992, the year Prime Minister John Major announced her separation from Prince Charles; the year of Andrew Morton’s explosive book Diana; the Queen’s ‘Annus horribilis’.
All the designers who worked with her understood that the transition — from dressing to be looked at to dressing to be heard — conveyed a desire to reshape her image that went beyond fashion.
Yet at the time the meaning of Diana’s acquisition of the suited uniform of a late-nineties executive was never dissected; in part because of the complexities and mixed messages that were the story of her life.
her parade of ever-shortening shift dresses, plunging necklines and sinuous, backless columns were simultaneously distracting attention, occupying fashion opinion columns and causing speculation into the state of her love-life.
But the nuanced change in her tailoring was just as telling: she no longer wanted decorative dinner suits or eighties- style ladies-who-lunch outfits for idle trophy wives. her hats disappeared. She sought out two new
female designers, Ronit Zilkha and Amanda Wakeley, who encapsulated efficient, businesslike practicality in a single hit of colour. Fussy, mumsy blouses were replaced by plain silk T-shirts.
She even wore pinstripe, donning a fitted navy pinstripe dress and coat to a Centrepoint charity reception, for example. It was a mark of Diana’s new maturity that she managed to wear it without seeming to wear a costume or to be ‘playing’ at business.
This wasn’t dressing for show or for fun, but to engage with serious subjects in a serious way.
‘There was a point in her life when she was changing. I’d started in 1990, in Brook Street, and it was just a matter of her walking in,’ Ronit Zilkha recalls. ‘She had such a perfect figure and was so fit, you never needed to change anything.’
Zilkha’s signatures were contrasting velvet collars, pocketflaps and piping; but nothing elaborate. ‘ Diana bought an orange one with a velvet collar she styled in different ways.’ There were no assistants; no special requests. The turning point came in April 1993, when Diana wore a Tomasz Starzewski pink long-line suit to make a compelling and personally informed speech to a conference on eating disorders.
Then came the bombshell — December 3, 1993 — she walked into a Grosvenor House charity lunch wearing a bottle- green Amanda Wakeley business suit to make an unexpected announcement: she would be resigning her links with all but a few of the more than 100 charities she had hitherto supported.
In fact, she was soon back, but now working with a whittled-down list of seven charities she could be personally involved with.
Between 1992 and 1997, her working wardrobe both encapsulated and masked her lifelong struggle to be considered an intelligent, worthwhile woman.
‘I was portrayed in the media, if I remember rightly, as someone, because I hadn’t passed any O-levels and hadn’t taken any A-levels, that I was stupid,’ she told Martin Bashir in the infamous Panorama interview of 1995. Her mute duty was defined for her, she told him. ‘ My husband did the speeches. I did the hand-shaking.’
Diana spent her later years reinventing herself, and it’s easy to forget how highly she was regarded on the international stage.
Abroad, she was a selfless, hardworking woman whose work personally and independently effected change in the world.
ATA glittering ceremony in New York in 1996, she received the International Humanitarian of the Year Award; and in the last year of her life, again in New York, she was famously pictured with Mother Teresa, at the Sisters of Mercy church in the Bronx, wearing a pure white suit of inescapable symbolism — two missionaries together, following the same calling to global humanitarianism.
At home, she was judged by harsher standards. As the fashion journalist Georgina Howell observed: ‘By then, had she been an ordinary woman, with an ordinary career, her years of
exceptional work would have qualified her for promotion.’ Yet still, critics castigated for her ‘trival and self-indulgent’ private life. In the end, the businesslike wardrobe Diana amassed was her go- to- work armour; the style which was emerging to empower a Nineties generation of women who wanted to deflect attention from how they looked onto what they said and did.
More than 20 years later, it’s now part of the accepted uniform of politics, right and left, from Theresa May to Nicola Sturgeon, worn by women at the top of the City, by headmistresses and girls going to their first job interviews.
Diana helped it along. In 1995, Gianni Versace designed his Conservative Chic’ collection, which made a 180-degree turn from sexy shapes to provide the neat pastel- shaded dress-and-jacket suits she bought in multiples. She had a Chanel mint suit in the same shape. Finally, fashion had come o her, not the other way round. She branched into a Dior trousersuit with frilled edges, too, and occasionally wore her long-line ackets over leggings — a classic of today’s celebrity airport style. It was the phase in her life that would culminate in the massively significant clear-out of the clothes she wore as the Princess of Wales — a wardrobe revamp that symbolised nothing less than a wholescale change of identity.
An auction of 80 of the formal evening gowns she wore while still a member of the Royal Family was scheduled for June 1997, at Christie’s in New York, and as if to underline the point, she flew out from London looking smart and relaxed in a caramel summerweight trouser suit by Ronit Zilkha, with a laptop under one arm and a tote bag full of paperwork in the other hand.
No longer the clothes horse, but the workhorse.
‘ You felt like this was the beginning of a new Diana,’ confirms Zilkha.
Tragically, it wasn’t. Yet that sale, too, spoke to Diana’s stunning effectiveness in her work. It raised $3.25 million for cancer and Aids charities. As the last hammer came down, she had become one of the greatest philanthropists in the world.