The Diana legacy
As a new exhibition showcasing the late Princess of Wales’ wardrobe opens at Kensington Palace, Justine Picardie pays tribute to a royal style icon
Inever knew Diana, but like millions of others who lived through her era, I saw the arc of her rise to fame, and witnessed the wild convulsion of grief that gripped the nation after her sudden death two decades ago. She and I were the same age, born within days of each other, and though our paths never crossed, I do know a few of those who were close to her; yet to me, she remains an elusive and enigmatic spirit. What is clear, however, as is evident in Patrick Demarchelier’s portraits of Diana that were published in Harper’s Bazaar, both before and after her death, is that she was a great beauty. And she was also a beloved friend of the then editor of Bazaar Liz Tilberis, who had first met the young Princess in the mid 1980s.
At the time of their early encounters, Diana was deeply unhappy, suffering from the bulimia that had plagued her since her engagement to Prince Charles when she was just 19, and from the grief associated with a failing marriage. In her memorial tribute to the Princess, Tilberis wrote in Bazaar: ‘As Diana was going through some of the worst moments of her life, I was also hitting mine. When I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1993, Diana became the most loyal and cheering of friends. In spite of her own troubles over her separation and divorce, and all of her thousands of commitments to others, she’d call me constantly.’ This kindness and compassion was also manifest in Diana’s warm and open-hearted approach to the homeless, people with Aids, and those afflicted with diseases such as leprosy, which had pushed them beyond the margins of society. ‘How many of us even begin to show such generosity?’ asked Tilberis. ‘Only now can we truly see she how much she was on the side of the angels. A bright light has gone out of my life, and I feel the world has become a darker place without her.’
Several others of Diana’s friends recognised her instability, but adored her all the same. Clive James, for example, writing in The New Yorker two weeks after her death, admitted: ‘Even before I met her, I had already guessed that she was a handful. After I met her, there was no doubt about it. Clearly on a hair trigger, she was unstable at best, and when the squeeze was on she was a fruitcake on the rampage. But even while reaching this conclusion, I was already smitten, and from then on everything I found out about her at first hand, even – especially – her failings and her follies, only made me love her more, because there were none of them that had not once been mine, and some of them still were. In her vivid interior drama I saw my own…’
His words seem to me to be remarkably perceptive, for Diana’s appeal was not that of a remote royal, but that of a woman gifted with a near-miraculous ability to reflect the trials and tribulations, as well as the triumphs, in the daily lives of others, as well as her own. Hence the sense that so many people shared, after her death following a car crash in Paris on 31 August 1997, that they had lost a true friend.
I must confess that I was not one of those who grieved in this way, partly because Diana’s death coincided with the last days of my sister’s life (she died of cancer three weeks later), and I was far more preoccupied with her suffering. But in the months that followed, I wondered if the profound national mourning for Diana was an expression of something else; a deep regret, perhaps, for the end of the ‘happy ever after’ that her wedding had promised? ‘Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made,’ proclaimed Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as he presided over the nuptials at St Paul’s Cathedral on 29 July 1981, while sunshine bathed the hundreds of thousands of onlookers who lined the route of Diana’s procession.
But the shadows were already apparent, to anyone who was not seduced by the romantic myth. At their first official television appearance earlier that year, Diana had looked like a shy, virginal teenager whose beauty was only just beginning to emerge, in her demure pussy-bow blouse and a blue suit to match her sapphire engagement ring. Beside her stood her handsome prince, nearly 13 years older than her, but his hesitant response to the interviewer’s polite question about whether the newly engaged couple were in love was not altogether reassuring: ‘Whatever “in love” means…’
Despite the private doubts that the couple may have been feeling after their all-too-brief courtship, there appeared to be no turning back. Indeed, as Diana herself subsequently admitted in a secretly taped interview for her biographer Andrew Morton, she was overcome with fear two days before the wedding that Prince Charles was still in love with his former girlfriend Camilla Parker Bowles. ‘I said [to her two sisters] “I can’t marry him, I can’t do this…”’ Their response, according to Diana, was pragmatic: ‘Your face is on the tea towels, so you’re too late to chicken out.’ By that point, her face was not just on the commemorative tea towels, but emblazoned across acres of newsprint and myriad magazine covers; yet as her celebrity increased, so too did her anxiety.
This, then, was the young woman, who walked down the aisle soon after her 20th birthday, watched by a global television audience of 750 million people. As another of Diana’s biographers, Sally Bedell Smith, has observed: ‘Her voluminous ivory taffeta and lace wedding dress, with its 25-foot train, was a romantic vision straight out of the novels written by her step-grandmother Barbara Cartland. Diana had lost nearly 14 pounds during her engagement, and her waistline had contracted from 29 to 23 inches, causing the designers to take in the dress several times. To the public, the dress emphasised