On the evening of June 29, 1994, amid a scorching heat wave, around 100 camera people crowded onto the sidewalk outside of London’s Serpentine Gallery, where a gala hosted by Vanity Fair’s then editor in chief Graydon Carter was just getting started. And suddenly, there she was—Princess Diana, the woman of the hour, exiting her chauffeured Rolls Royce and kissing her host’s cheeks.
“As she got out of the car, it was impossible not to gasp,” gallerist Dame Julia Peyton-Jones recalled. “Diana was one of the most famous and beautiful women in the world... it was as if she’d come down to earth from another planet. She looked sensational in her off-the-shoulder, low-cut garment, and we all felt drab and old-fashioned in comparison.”
Created by Greek designer Christina Stambolian, Diana’s little black dress with a sweetheart neckline and a sexy above-the-knee asymmetrical hem was an instant fashion sensation, a sartorial coming-out party, after years of being beholden to the royal’s strict rules regarding wardrobe and protocol. Even the head-to-toe black was a no-no for royal family members, only to be worn during mourning periods.
“Her head was held high, and she had a grin on her face,” Eloise Moran writes in The Lady Di Look Book. “No more shoulder pads, just her naked shoulders, strong and stoic. Around her neck was a pearl and sapphire choker that she had worn at many official royal engagements during the eighties—inarguably a nod to her ill-fated marriage and past life, worn like a badge of honour, contrasted against a powerfully risqué ensemble which signaled a sense of an awakening and a new dawn.”
As she arrived in what was immediately dubbed the “revenge dress,” ITV was airing a long-awaited sit-down interview with her estranged husband, Prince Charles, where he admitted shamefully that he had indeed been faithful…until his marriage had “irretrievably broken down, us having both tried.”
Suddenly, news of the Prince of Wales’s mea culpa was overshadowed by his scene-stealing, soon-to-be ex-wife. “It was the ultimate power move and the first step in the confident final chapter of her story,” Moran writes. “That evening marked the turning point in Diana’s personal narrative.”
Throughout the summer of 1994, Diana continued to proclaim her independence, blossoming into the new woman she wanted to be.
The year had begun as one of uncertainty and change for the Princess of Wales. In December of 1993, she had officially retired from royal public duties, telling the press she hoped to have “a meaningful public role with, hopefully, a more private life.”
With no more royal calendar to adhere to, Diana was free for the first time since stepping onto the world stage in 1981. “Having dismissed her bodyguards, she can pursue the life of a private, albeit privileged, citizen,” Michael Posner wrote that year in Chatelaine. “She often drives her own sporty green Audi 2.3SE around West London, lunching at the tony San Lorenzo or Launceston Place, playing tennis at the exclusive Vanderbilt Racquet Club and taking weekly massage and therapy sessions at a Chinese clinic.”
She focused on her health, reportedly taking Prozac to ease her depression, delving into aromatherapy and other unconventional healing practices, and working hard to overcome her eating disorder. “Thanks to her daily workout with Carolan Brown, her figure had never looked better,” Tina Brown writes in The Diana Chronicles. “The vestigial tall-girl slouch replaced by a sculpted, broad-shouldered pride. She loved showing off her new shape. At the Chelsea Harbour Club, where she worked out every morning, she flirted outrageously with England’s macho rugby captain, Will Carling.”
She also cultivated a new set of friends, like Vogue fashion editor Anna Harvey, Rosa Monckton, the managing director of Tiffany, and Lucia Flecha de Lima, the glamorous 53-year-old wife of the Brazilian ambassador to the UK whom Diana claimed was the “mother I would have like to have had.”
This new Rolodex suited both Diana’s temperament and her needs. “They are drawn largely from the world of the arts,” the Evening Standard reported in 1994. “An area in which she is something of an icon. It is a world which celebrates an international kind of celebrity rather than the stuffy, rather philistine British monarchy.”
During the early months of 1994, she laid relatively low, with an occasional charity event and a much-publicized trip to the ski slopes of Austria with her sons. Her relative seclusion threw the paparazzi into a frenzy, with photos suddenly fetching 25% more than before her retirement.
Diana learned that lesson the hard way in May when she was papped sunbathing topless while on vacation in Málaga. But the photos were never published when the Spanish magazine group Hola!/Hello purchased and hid them.
According to The Diana Chronicles, it was a private May trip to Paris with Flecha de Lima and friend Hayat Palumbo that may have encouraged Diana to return in full force to the public eye. According to Palumbo, Diana was overwhelmed with support when she was recognized by churchgoers at the Saint Rita Church on the Left Bank. The power of her fame and charisma was evident.
“The women all rushed to Diana saying, ‘Madame, Madame we support you.’ And what was amazing was the way she changed,” Palumbo told Brown. “She was just shining, as she was surrounded by the old women of the church…. I was first surprised and then moved by the welling up of love for her, the way the women tried to touch her as if she was the Virgin Mary. She slipped into this natural communication with them…She held their hands, and looked into their eyes very carefully, and tried to reply in French.”
She also received an enormous amount of good press in May when she helped pull a drowning unhoused man out of a canal in Regents Park, and later visited him twice in the hospital.
But there were other, less benevolent reasons for a public return. Diana was well aware that Charles was in full damage control mode, determined to get his side of the story out to the world. Their camps were at war, and Diana knew the embarrassing, personal things Charles would reveal—both through the ITV interview with journalist Jonathan Dimbleby and Dimbleby’s upcoming book written in cooperation with the prince.
And so in June, her birthday month, Diana made her case as a liberated, self-determined woman. She did the dutiful things: taking William and Harry to a homeless shelter, receiving a tepid kiss on the cheek from Charles on Parents’ Day at their sons’ school, and joining the royal family in France for the 50th commemoration of D-Day. But she also launched a full-force assault in the press, celebrating her independence and new life.
Diana was the cover girl on the June issue of British Vogue, which featured new, joyful portraits of her by the photographer Patrick Demarchelier. In America, she was on the cover of People wearing a casual Philadelphia Eagles jacket, the headline blaring: “Diana’s Daring New Life…Anything goes, as a liberated Diana struggles to find herself.”
On June 21, there was even a kind of warm-up to the “revenge dress,” when she attended a party at the Ritz in honor of Sir James Goldsmith, wearing a sleek, sequined low-cut black gown.
The press took notice. “Last week…[Diana] made a very public exit for a party at the Ritz, standing in the street in a slinky new dress, with excited photographers all around,” The Independent reported. “The result was another sartorial contrast; ‘sexy’ Di outshining ‘straitlaced’ Charles in a kilt and jumper.”
As June 29 approached, speculation about what Charles would say in the televised interview came to a fever pitch. Though Diana had originally declined her invitation to the party at Serpentine Gallery (of which she was a patron), she seems to have had a change of heart two days before, calling an old family friend who was in charge of the gala.
“She said she wanted to come after all,” the anonymous friend told Brown. “I said, ‘What are you up to?’ And she said, ‘You’ll see.’”
Diana had originally planned to wear a Valentino gown for the event but was infuriated when the fashion house sent out a press release touting her plan, according to Moran. Instead, she chose a dress by the lesser-known Christina Stambolian, which she had purchased on a shopping trip in 1991. “I want a special dress for a special occasion,” she told Stambolian. “It doesn’t matter if it is short or long. It has to be something special.”
Three years later, it was finally the right moment for Diana to reveal this special dress to the world. “[The Princess] chose not to play the scene like Odette, innocent in white,” Stambolian later said. “She was clearly angry. She played it like Odile, in black. She wore bright red nail enamel, which we had never seen her do before. She was saying, ‘Let’s be wicked tonight.’”
And even the jaded crowd at the Serpentine Gallery was swept away by Diana’s allure that night. “I can’t think of anyone in the world,” fellow guest Dominick Dunne marveled to The New York Times, “who has the ability Princess Diana has to stun a crowd by simply entering a room."
It was a PR masterstroke. The next day in The Sun, a large picture of Diana entering the gallery was placed next to the headline: “The Thrilla He Left to Woo Camilla.”
Even The Guardian noted her triumph:
But as Moran notes, Diana had in fact been sending signals through her increasingly daring wardrobe—which included designs from Versace, Ralph Lauren, and Valentino—even before her separation from Charles in 1992. “[The dress] 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,” Moran observes in The Lady Di Look Book. “Princess Diana had a fuck you wardrobe—and a new, modern haircut to go with it.”
And as a person who was a master of optics, she was shrewd in what she wore to events. “She knew that every time she stepped out of the car there’d be a thousand people waiting for her to see what she was wearing, which dress, which shoes, which jewelry,” designer Jacques Azagury recalled. “She was aware and she didn’t like to disappoint… It was a big deal for her and she loved it.”
This increasing confidence was on display during the rest of the summer of ’94, as Charles was mocked for his betrayal and weak showing in the Dimbleby interview. Both attended the July 14 wedding of Princess Margaret’s daughter, Lady Sarah, Diana cheerfully walking into the church sans her estranged husband. In August, she joined the de Limas in Martha’s Vineyard, where new friends like Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham were struck by her charm and “somewhat mocking and ever-present humor.”
Despite it all, the summer would end on a sour note. Another scandal was brewing, this time reports of hundreds of nuisance calls Diana had allegedly placed to her dashing art-dealer lover Oliver Hoare and his oil heiress wife Diane de Waldner. Doing it her own way, in late August, Diana summoned the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay to a three-hour sit down in which she denied the allegations, claiming coyly, “I don’t know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box.”
Then there was the publication of Anna Pasternak’s Princess in Love (about Diana’s affair with James Hewitt), published in October, the same month that Dimbleby’s The Prince of Wales: A Biography appeared. But really, it did not matter. Diana had, in a way, made herself untouchable, an international celebrity on her terms. Next, she was off to Washington DC, where she was feted by power players. At an evening event, she wore a low-cut, sequined gown, cheekily saying she was saddened that “so many trees had to be cut down” so stories about her could be printed.
An American once asked if she had ever gambled, the invigorated Diana had an apt response. “Not with cards,” she answered. “But with life.”
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