The Lady Di Look Book: What Diana Was Trying to Tell Us Through Her Clothes

INTRODUCTION

Diana: SACRIFICIAL LAMB TO REVENGE QUEEN

I accidentally became a Princess Diana fashion researcher in the summer of 2018.

For the few years prior to that, I’d been getting over my own marriage breakup, waking up with miserable midtwenties existential dread, and working in a job that paid the bills but almost bored me to an early grave. I was waiting for something to come along that would finally ignite a sense of purpose in me and capture my complete, undivided attention. One sweltering summer evening in New York, while I was sitting in my Brooklyn apartment with my window A/C desperately chugging away, that finally happened.

I watched the documentary Diana: In Her Own Words on Netflix, and the next day at work, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I got lost inside an internet vortex of old Princess Diana articles and paparazzi photos. There was something magnetizing about Lady Di; her story struck a chord with me, and I was surprised at how connected I felt to, well … a princess. THE Princess. She was so relatable, so present. As the title of the documentary suggests, Diana posthumously narrates the entire program, edited together from a series of tapes that she had recorded in secret with a friend she’d had since her teenage years, James Colthurst, and that consequently informed Andrew Morton’s writings in his infamous Princess Diana biography.

I had never had any kind of special interest in Princess Diana before. Of course, I was aware of her iconic status, especially since I grew up in London, but I was just five years old when she died. My only firsthand memory of the Princess was watching her funeral procession on TV with my mum and our elderly neighbour. I played on the rug in front of the television with my baby brother while the two of them sobbed and chain-smoked through the whole thing.

My research of Diana that day, and in the weeks following, drove me to my biggest aha! moment. Diana, princess or not, is just like us. Sure, it’s not every day that we’re plucked as teenagers from the obscurity of our parents’ manor houses and placed in a semi-arranged marriage with the future king of England. She’s like us because she went through the very human trials and tribulations many women face. Except she did it, I’m sure at times humiliatingly, in plain public sight. Every move she made, we watched and critiqued—we got a Truman Show–like view into this young woman’s life. We witnessed her weaknesses, her pain, a betrayal, her growth, and, ultimately, her emancipation. Diana is not relatable because of her status but because most women understand what it’s like to trust and have it broken, to speak and not always be heard, to be doubted and disbelieved. Most of us, unfortunately, have also encountered a Charles, or a dreaded Camilla.

I created the Instagram account @ladydirevengelooks shortly after I began my research. What started as intrigue had developed into a bit of an obsession. I had read about Diana wearing a little black dress, later dubbed her revenge dress due to the strategic timing of wearing it the very same evening that Prince Charles admitted his marital indiscretions to Jonathan Dimbleby, a veteran British presenter and broadcaster, on national television. That LBD was just a starting point for me. As I dug deeper into my research, and through an infinite archive of paparazzi photos taken after this moment, I connected the dots: this look wasn’t a standalone moment. It was part of a much larger, calculated wardrobe of nineties minimalist pantsuits, bold athleisure-wear, figure-hugging Versace minidresses, and Jimmy Choo strappy heels—the antithesis of her eighties poofy dresses, pleated skirts, and crisp oversized prairie collars. Princess Diana had a fuck you wardrobe—and a new, modern haircut to go with it.

My intention was to document her best postdivorce revenge looks and pair them with tongue-in-cheek captions (I was going through a breakup myself, so I had plenty of inspiration). I started with a photo of the smiling Princess in a green-and-blue bathing suit and a pair of Versace sunglasses and captioned it, The happy and healthy revenge look. I began following five of my closest friends, added a few more photos with slightly more wicked captions, and suddenly the fun began. To date, I’ve pored over thousands of Princess Diana images and at the time of writing this, I have over one hundred thousand followers. Many of them, like me, are too young to remember Diana firsthand yet often express their adoration for her.

A part of Diana’s story I found most intriguing is how little the public knew back then of her personal struggles—seldom did she give any interviews until 1995, when she sat down for the infamous Panorama interview with BBC journalist Martin Bashir. Recently, it was announced that Bashir falsified bank statements to gain access to Princess Diana and persuade her to do his interview. His faked documents played on some of her fears and suspicions and, according to family members, her paranoia. Unquestionably, the tactics the journalist used to secure his bombshell interview were deceptive, opportunistic, and indicative of a wider culture of exploitative journalism and a zero-boundaries media. I’ve watched the interview close to a dozen times and did so again when the Lord Dyson report came to light in May 2021. What makes me most uncomfortable is how quickly certain individuals have seized upon discrediting Diana’s actual words within the interview due to the nature of how it was obtained.

How the interview came to fruition is undeniably disturbing, but would Diana have wanted us to silence her now, all these years later? It seems to me that the Princess who had long been quieted, the woman who for years had sought to share her innermost thoughts and feelings via voice coaching and secret collaborations with her biographer, simply wanted to have her voice heard. There was an internal BBC investigation into Bashir shortly after the Panorama show aired, when concerns were initially raised about the questionable bank statements. During this inquiry, Diana handwrote a statement from Kensington Palace in defense of her interview: Martin Bashir did not show me any documents, nor give me any information that I was not previously aware of. I consented to the interview on Panorama without any undue pressure and have no regrets.¹

When watching the interview again, I got a strong sense (call it a woman’s intuition) that the person who spoke in that hour-long interview spoke her truth—and I don’t believe that anyone should have the right, back then or today, to argue with a woman’s declaration of consent.

One of my favorite quotes from that notorious interview was this: I think every strong woman in history has had to walk down a similar path, and I think it’s the strength that causes the confusion and the fear. Why is she strong? Where does she get it from? Where is she taking it? Where is she going to use it?²

We likely will never know what exactly happened, and of course we won’t ever know what Diana was really thinking. There was and always will be an air of mystery to the Princess. After studying thousands of photographs of her, I get the sense that she reveled in the enigma around her—it was almost her superpower, a small fragment of privacy that no one could invade. A narrative that she could control and finally have a say in.

I believe that we can unravel this enigma by looking closely at Lady Di’s clothes, alongside the known facts of her biography. If we look carefully, we can piece together a powerful story—one that’s at first a little sad, then uplifting, ultimately heartbreaking, but overwhelmingly human. From the very start, Diana communicated surreptitiously through what she wore. At her first official royal engagement, she opted for a black taffeta strapless gown—from designers Elizabeth and David Emanuel—much to the dismay of Prince Charles, who told her that black was only for people in mourning. She went against his objections, later saying in her secret tapes with Colthurst that she wasn’t a part of his family yet, reflecting black to me was the smartest color you could possibly have at the age of nineteen. It was a real grown-up dress.³ She wore the dress, with its décolletage-baring neckline, and her stab at freedom was immortalized in the press the next day, accompanied by the headline, Daring Di Takes the Plunge. This was perhaps the start of a track record for ruffling the feathers of royal courtiers—the men in grey, as Diana called them.

Later in 1980, Diana wore her infamous black sheep sweater, made by British label Warm & Wonderful, a tongue-in-cheek and not-so-subtle choice for the nineteen-year-old who had been thrust full force into the strict codes of royal life. Then came the I’m a Luxury sweater by British knitwear label Gyles & George, known for their cheeky offbeat slogans and witty knits. On the back, the sweater reads Few Can Afford. To this day, almost forty years after she wore these knitted pieces, the Princess, the sheep sweater, and the cheeky slogan knit all seem to be inextricably linked. She was certainly both a black sheep and a luxury, daring yet delicate.

In the mideighties, roughly around the time she plucked up the courage to confront Camilla face-to-face, we witness the beginning of Diana’s transformation. The hair was wilder, the shoulder pads bigger, the silhouettes more confident. She also had a thing for sequins and lamé, which earned her the nickname Dynasty Di.

A standout Dynasty Di look for me was at the 1989 premiere of the film Shirley Valentine, when the Princess appeared on the red carpet in a figure-hugging Catherine Walker gown, mermaid-green sequins cascading down to her ankles. It was an extravagant look for a premiere, which, judging by the grin across Diana’s face, she was certainly looking forward to.

The movie (coincidentally one of my favorites) is centered around a Liverpudlian housewife trapped in a world of domesticity and ennui, dealing with verbal abuse from her husband on a nightly basis. Shirley Valentine talks to her kitchen wall in the day, sharing her dissatisfaction with how her life has turned out: I have allowed myself to lead this little life, when inside me there was so much more. And it’s all gone unused. And now it never will be. Why do we get all this life if we don’t ever use it?

After a row with her husband, Shirley decides to join her friend on a vacation to Mykonos, where she meets a rugged Greek waiter named Costas and has a passionate fling (including some hot sur deck boat sex). One can’t help but wonder if Diana, sitting in her theater seat embellished in dazzling sequins, could relate to Shirley. I wonder if she smirked when Shirley delivered one of the film’s most memorable lines: "I’m not sayin’ he’s bad, my fella. He’s just no bleedin’