Diana: Designing a Princess provokes mixed emotions - review
When Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (nee Kate Middleton) came onto the scene, there was a new royal obsession to replace that of Diana, Princess of Wales. Which is why a documentary about the late Princess’s fashion journey felt almost like a pleasant novelty.
The reason for Diana: Designing a Princess (BBC Two) is an exhibition of her dresses at Kensington Palace to mark the 20th anniversary of her death. This preview was presented by Brenda Emmanus as an odyssey. Diana, lest we forget, emerged blinking Bambi-ishly into the public gaze, sporting the Sloane armour of turned-up collar and pearls.
Her progression, via the frilly New Romantic fairy-tale look, to something sharper and – let’s be frank – sexier seemed, ahem, seamless. But there were creases along the way. Remember that night she wore plunging black in ignorance of protocol and the paparazzi’s eye for an eyeful?
The one startling omission was any reference to the bulimia that must have had some impact on her creative relationships with designers. Interviews with all of them helped to lift this brief, light documentary. They were kindly and respectful; if they had any horror stories they weren’t telling. And they were highly discreet about Diana’s decision, as her marriage crumbled, to take the concept of a fashion statement to a whole new level.
We were reminded of the so-called “revenge dress” worn on the night Charles admitted adultery on national television. And the hot black number she wore the night her Panorama interview was broadcast. If, by the end, her daywear was all about clearing mines and healing the sick, by night she was planning to go more provocative yet. Designer Jacques Azagury revealed that her next dress’s statement was along the lines of “ain’t no hem high enough, ain’t no cleavage deep enough”.
This year, the Princess would have turned 56, which seems unimaginable. However ravishing the designs, there is something ghoulish about dresses modelled by tailor’s dummies, once worn by a woman hounded until she died in a car crash in a Paris underpass by the world’s prurient focus on her every move. This is partly because she looked wonderful in dresses. So, this retrospective provoked mixed feelings.
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