After The Crown’s fifth season closed out with Princess Diana preparing to embrace the super yacht summers of the Al-Fayed family, the sixth instalment will see the increasingly estranged royal, played by Elizabeth Debicki, perish in the spotlight. Her personal style during that final summer of Saint-Tropez trips, Vanity Fair cover shoots and charitable galas showed a woman who, despite the omnipresent paparazzi lenses encroaching on her privacy, was moving into a new phase of life – one that was resolutely for her. It made Diana’s untimely death on 31 August 1997 all the more tragic for a nation that had christened her its People’s Princess.
Swimsuited and suntanned in the south of France with Dodi Al-Fayed, Di was all leopard print and neon. On the New York ball scene, she chose tank dresses to show off the spoils of Mediterranean jaunts and her Chelsea Harbour Health Club membership back home. For philanthropic visits to Lahore and Bosnia, she was the picture of casual professionalism, balancing democratic dressing with an air of approachability that only ever read as genuine. During her last meeting with Mother Teresa, which saw the pair walk hand in hand around the Bronx, Diana’s classic white skirt suit evoked a message of purity and peace.
The Princess had grown to understand the currency of her fashion. A balmy Manhattan evening in June saw her wave goodbye to custom treasures – like the Victor Edelstein gown she famously wore to dance with John Travolta at the White House – with a Christie’s auction of 79 of her cocktail and evening dresses. To watch bids mount to some $3.25 million for the newly condensed list of charities she supported, such as the Royal Marsden and Aids Crisis Trust, Diana wore an embellished floral Catherine Walker shift dress, which her stylist Anna Harvey later reflected had been one of “her most successful looks to date”.
Her distilled wardrobe saw the glamour of Dynasty Di streamlined into a more sporty, practical proposition. From casual-chic chinos and loafers to A-line midi-dresses and sling-backs, she understood what worked for her lifestyle. Or as close collaborator Jacques Azagury said, “She knew she had great legs, and after her divorce she wanted to show them off.” Indeed, when reporting on that Christie’s sale of Diana’s past royal hits, fashion critic Suzy Menkes, formerly of the International Herald Tribune, said they looked, “like a dress rehearsal for the little black number worn on the evening Prince Charles confessed to adultery on prime-time television”. There was a confident, curated arc to her image – or “personal brand”, to use today’s terminology.
Were Diana to reflect on her fashion legacy, it might chime with Hamish Bowles’s musings to Tina Brown in The Diana Chronicles. Hers, said the former Vogue editor, was an “English style refracted through an un-English sensibility”. The Princess trod her own path and that’s why her every phase – from the wide-eyed Sloane Ranger who fell for Prince Charles, to the woman who finally stripped back the layers of regal frou-frou and became increasingly comfortable in her own skin – continues to compel to this day.
