The Crown puts Princess Diana’s fashion legacy back in the spotlight
As season five of The Crown drops on Netflix today the fashion legacy of Princess Diana once again takes the spotlight.
In terms of utter fashion catnip, The Crown season five is certain to deliver. It may take in the year of the late Queen’s annus horribilis – 1992, a year of unending tabloid fodder and dysfunction within The Firm – but Princess Diana’s style, to be immortalised on-screen by Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki in this season, was, and remains, unparalleled.
Debicki, whose resemblance to Diana is almost unnervingly uncanny, was snapped during production in re-creations of some of the princess’s most famous ensembles.
Most of them, it must be said, were worn in that post-annus horribilis period. This is when Diana, one of the most photographed women in the world, came into her own – bike shorts, Versace mini dresses, shoulder-padded blazers and all.
Indeed Tina Brown, former Vanity Fair editor and author of a biography of Princess Diana, The Diana Chronicles, and the new and quite spiky royal family tome, The Palace Papers, once described Diana’s style evolution as her “extraordinary physical transformation from mouse to movie star.”
Showing Princess Diana’s evolution, from “Shy Di” with her sweet piecrust collars, that iconic meringue of a wedding dress and Sloane Ranger style to a sleek, confident and complex woman who broke the rules, is something The Crown costume department took seriously.
Overseen by Amy Roberts (who won an Emmy for outstanding period costumes on series three) with the assistance of buyer and costume designer Sidonie Roberts (no relation), the costume department undertook extensive research, combing through everything from history books to old Miu Miu campaigns, to not only recreate Diana’s looks but to capture the mode and the mood of the times.
“We know everyone is waiting for those moments, and try to do them justice by steering as close to the reality as possible,” Roberts told the UK’s The Sunday Times Style.
One of the looks is, of course, the infamous “revenge dress” – the racy, black off-the-shoulder Christina Stambolian number Princess Diana wore to a gala at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1994 on the very same evening Prince Charles made his admission of adultery on national television.
It not only crystallised Diana’s new modus operandi (she and Charles separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996), but quite seismically captured a mood almost all of us can relate to – show ’em what they’re missing.
As her stylist, former Vogue editor Anna Harvey, once said of the dress, “she wanted to look a million dollars, and she did”. That said, when Harvey first started working with Diana, it was rather slim pickings.
“She really had nothing in her own wardrobe – a few Laura Ashley blouses and skirts, and some bobbly jumpers. That was it,” Harvey once noted.
The meaning behind the revenge dress was something Roberts said the costume department especially sought to capture, telling Style: “There’s a beautiful kind of symbolism in the fact that it’s black. Until this moment, we have only ever used the colour black to mark a funeral or someone in mourning. Captured in one dress is the death of a marriage and the death of her relationship with the palace. Everything changed after that.”
Camilla Freeman-Topper, creative director of Australian womenswear brand Camilla & Marc, agrees that the revenge dress was potent.
“The sexy LBD is still so elegant and timeless. It was a daring reflection of how she was feeling at the time, it evoked a sense of freedom, which is what I loved about it,” she says.
But as Freeman-Topper notes, it’s Diana’s “off-duty” looks from the late 1980s and ’90s that have become particular and eternal style references, especially for younger generations.
“Diana’s off-duty wardrobe has come to be more influential in recent generations, the oversized T-shirts and bike short combo she’d wear to the gym, or the humble cotton shirt and mum jeans to pick up her kids, which keep resurfacing on my Instagram,” says Freeman-Topper.
“She wore everything with such ease and you can’t help but want to mirror her effortlessness.
“She was everything all at once; elegant, glamorous, sporty … every generation will return to Diana for the fact that we all want to emulate Diana’s sense of confidence and effortless energy. Clothes were her way of communicating with the world.”
The elevation of Princess Diana to style-icon status can be measured in many ways.
There’s the Instagram accounts dedicated to her style, and the 35 million views on the Gen Z-dominated TikTok hashtag, #PrincessDianaStyle.
There’s the way ’90s power minimalism, over which Diana ruled at the time – boxy blazers, athleisure, cowboy boots, baseball caps, oversized vintage sweatshirts – remains the unofficial uniform of It-girls everywhere now. This includes model Hailey Bieber, who starred in a 2019 fashion editorial homage to Princess Diana in Vogue France.
Princess Diana’s style was on the mood board for the late Virgil Abloh’s spring 2018 Off-White collection and a reference for American fashion designer Tory Burch for spring-summer 2020.
Less overt references to her style can be spied everywhere from Hedi Slimane’s collections for Celine to cool-girl brand The Frankie Shop. Meanwhile, in 2020, cult New York preppy label Rowing Blazers collaborated with Gyles & George, the original designers of her kitschy sweaters, such as one with “I’m a Luxury” emblazoned across the front, that Diana favoured in the ’80s, to re-release them. They sold out instantly.
However, Freeman-Topper says there’s more to Diana’s appeal than her fashion.
“She modernised the monarchy in many ways, particularly through her wardrobe, which made her more relatable to the public, but also in her latter days, sparked a sense of rebellion which only added to her allure,” she says.
British fashion journalist Eloise Moran, author of The Lady Di Look Book: What Diana Was Trying to Tell Us Through Her Clothes and founder of the influential Instagram account @ladydirevengelooks (119k followers), which analyses Diana’s post-Charles style evolution, agrees. She says it makes sense that many young people have a connection to Diana and the way she used clothes to make a point.
“I think a younger generation fell in love with Diana’s looks, and her overall life story because there really is so much to relate to there. Diana is an everywoman in many ways – she went through so many of the trials and tribulations that many women face, except under exceptional circumstances,” she says. “We have such a rich, full-circle story of Diana, and we really got to witness her growth, and I think so many are inspired by that. The fabulous clothes, and the authentic sense of style she adopted in her 30s are part of that – which I think is what gives them more significance and why designers keep returning to Diana season after season.”
Moran pegs the Versace mini-dresses Diana wore in 1996 as she reinvented herself after exiting the royal family as her favourite Princess Diana looks.
“They’re so minimalistic, elegant and sexy. To me, they portray a sense of growth and confidence. If you remember, she was known as Shy Di for many years, and these dresses are the antithesis of that label,” she says. “She used her clothes as her armour, in a way.”
The Crown season five is now streaming on Netflix.
