“It felt weird,” hairstylist Sam McKnight says over the phone. “But then, it was one of my first jobs after lockdown so I thought, ‘You know what? You’re thinking about this too much.’” The “weird” task in question? Recreating his former client Princess Diana’s hairstyle on actor Emma Corrin (who plays the late royal in the forthcoming series of The Crown), for British Vogue’s October 2020 cover. Having been the real Princess Diana’s personal hairstylist for seven years (from 1990 until her untimely death in 1997), a candid McKnight confesses he had his reservations upon hearing the brief, but adds: “To be honest, Emma is playing Diana before I even met her, so it felt fine. We took a nod to the photos of Diana [in that period] and made a little pastiche of it.”
The results are really rather fabulous. Voluminous, bouncy and wind-whipped, it’s a big ’do that’s wholly reminiscent of Princess Diana’s fluffy locks in the ’80s. “Like Diana, Emma has a ton of hair. I set it on hot rollers and treated it as I would have done on shoots for Vogue in the ’80s,” McKnight says. “Whenever the model came into the studio in the ’80s she got big hair. Whether her hair was short, long or in between, we went big with a hot roller set, backcombing and hairspray.” His secret weapon for Corrin’s look, he says, was his Hair by Sam McKnight Modern Hairspray, which is great for volume, hold, shine and finish. “And it brushes out really easily, unlike the old hairsprays of the ’80s, which were like glue!”
Of course, it wasn’t this fluffy, youthful hair that ultimately came to define Princess Diana’s beauty look – it was the cut McKnight gave the princess in 1990. The hairstylist, who met Diana on a Vogue shoot with Patrick Demarchelier and Anna Harvey, recalls a “very tall, leggy blonde bounding into the studio, and we just fell in love with her”. The famous photographs from that day are easy to recall, featuring Princess Diana wearing a white dress, tiara and a big smile on her face. McKnight has saved the portrait in (ultra-glamorous) fridge magnet form, to remind him of that special time.
“At the end of the shoot she asked me what I’d do to her hair if I could do anything I wanted, and I said, ‘Well, I’d just cut it all off and start again,’ because it was 1990. There was a sharpening up of those really maximalist silhouettes from the ’80s coming, and a much leaner, almost androgynous power dressing had appeared on the scene. I said, ‘Cut it off, get rid of the ’80s frou-frou and start again with a minimal, short haircut.’ Which is what we did.”
Indeed, it is McKnight who Diana credited with helping to change the way she felt about herself in the early ’90s. “Someone sent me a television clip of her, [filmed] around the time of the Andrew Morton book, where the interviewer asked her what sparked her confidence to change in the early ’90s, and she actually said that it was Sam, who cut her hair. I melted,” McKnight says now. It makes sense. Our attitude towards our hair often mirrors our attitude to ourselves, which makes the person we trust with cutting and styling it very special – whether we’re royalty or not.
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