Fashion‘She was gangsta with her clothes’: how Princess Diana became 2020’s biggest style icon

Fashion

‘She was gangsta with her clothes’: how Princess Diana became 2020’s biggest style icon

Except, of course, that this was no fairytale. If she were still alive, Diana would be 59, the same age as George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Barack Obama. Instead, a global TV audience of 2.5 billion people watched her funeral 23 years ago – more than three times the number who had watched her wedding. As we try to metabolise the grief, fear and anxiety of 2020, The Crown’s rerun of the royal wedding will redress that balance, just a little. Even on Netflix, without a street party in sight, it will symbolise hope, as weddings always do. And then we will get to see Diana in her prime: adorable in a tweed suit, ravishing in an evening dress. The unhappy ending can wait until the next series, because 2020 needs all the good memories it can get.

The gown Diana wore for her St Paul’s Cathedral wedding is often described as ultra-feminine, but that is not quite right. Ultra-old-fashioned, more like, in what it said about Britain and about the role of a woman hereby appointed wife and mother to future kings. The Emanuels were instructed to make the construction of the dress as elaborate as possible, to ensure copies would not become available to mere mortals. This was the Britain of high seas and empire: sleeves like something out of a Holbein, lacquered and tiara-ed hair the scale of Nelson’s hat, 10,000 pearls webbed by London’s most skilful embroiderers in a touch that Elizabeth I would have appreciated. The exaggerated proportions of the dress made the young bride look like a child at a birthday party. She is the centre of attention, but not the centre of power.

Diana seized control of her wardrobe pretty quickly after that, but her clothes remained as much a public-facing messaging system as a personal delight. She applied her sharp emotional intelligence, using fashion to win people over. In Saudi Arabia, she wore a dress emblazoned with gold falcons, emblem of the kingdom, a chessboard move of sartorial diplomacy that has echoed through the wardrobes of first ladies and royals since. “If she was visiting a hospital for blind people, she would wear velvet so that she would feel warm and tactile,” recalls Eleri Lynn, the curator of the 2017 exhibition Diana: Her Fashion Story.

Her image is everywhere – in the return of The Crown, a Hollywood film, musical and emulated on the cover of Vogue. For the younger generation, there is no greater fashion inspiration right now.

Until this spring, the defining experience of shared grief and loss in living British memory could be summed up in one word: Diana. The sea of flowers outside Kensington palace. The outpouring of emotion that recalibrated a country’s self-image. The cultural and political shock waves that threatened the monarchy. And the sickening jolt that comes with finding that the world can turn itself upside down without a moment’s notice.

Now, in this strange season of death, Diana is about to make a return to our national life. The fourth season of The Crown has already put Princess Diana back in Vogue. But there is also a documentary to mark the 25th anniversary of her death, and a Hollywood film, Spencer, in the works, in which Kristen Stewart plays the princess. Netflix has also announced the Diana musical is to be filmed and broadcast next year. While in real life, the row over her interview with Martin Bashir has reignited, with Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, calling for a formal inquiry into how it was secured.

Emma Corrin, the actor who plays Diana in this series, graced the cover of the October issue as a vision of 80s royal glamour in a strapless sapphire-blue Oscar de la Renta ballgown, resplendent with the feathered hair and moonbeam complexion of the young princess.

The Diana who is coming back to life most vividly is not the tragic “people’s princess” of 1997, but the fairytale bride of 1981. A close replica of her silk taffeta wedding dress was made for The Crown’s royal wedding scene – complete with 7.6-metre (25ft) train. The designers David and Elizabeth Emanuel provided the original patterns for the dress and a copy was made by a team of 20 seamstresses, with David Emanuel on hand as a consultant. It is a mark of how vivid the memory of Diana remains that the same costume department that skilfully updated the mid-century tailoring of the Queen, the 60s daring of Princess Margaret and the 70s chic of Princess Anne, altering silhouette and colour to make those wardrobes palatable to the modern eye, has stuck faithfully to the original wedding dress, in all its overblown glory.

As a fashion icon, Diana occupies hallowed territory alongside Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly and Jackie Onassis, but she did not start out with great style. In our first glimpse of Diana in the new series of The Crown, we see her as a schoolgirl, dressed as a tree, then as a part-time nursery school teacher. Her sensible peacoat is sixth-former-adjacent, her ballet pumps well worn, her skirts oversized and slightly droopy. There is not a glimmer here of the Diana who would later wield her glamour like a superpower on the world stage.