Princess Diana got fashion advice from Prince Charles.

Princess Diana

Princess Diana

Anna Harvey, who styled the late Princess, has recalled how the Princess - who was married to the Prince of Wales from 1981 to 1996 - called her then-husband into the room to give his verdict on one of her outfits.

She shared: "We'd have a meeting ahead of all the major tours, then I'd take a huge pile of options over to Kensington Palace and we'd spend a morning trying things on. Once, she put on a beautiful black velvet dress with a grey taffeta skirt by Murray Arbeid. 'Would you mind if I call in my husband to have a look?' she said. Prince Charles came in, and stood there quite bemused, seeing her in this extraordinary dress and me on the floor pinning the skirt.

"Some of the things we chose together weren't all that successful. I look at those pieces with big, padded shoulders and think, 'Why on earth did I put her in that?' or 'Did she really wear that?' But fashion is mercurial. We must have thought she looked good at the time. It's the same if you look through the pages of Vogue at that time, those Dynasty shoulders look dated and rather ugly."

And whilst she was tasked with helping style the royal, Anna admits Diana was "very much her own person" in the later years and knew what sort of outfits she wanted to wear.

Writing in her column for the Daily Telegraph newspaper, she shared: "Towards the end, Diana was very much her own person and it was only occasionally that she'd ring and say, 'I want a red suit, have you seen one anywhere?' (I think perhaps she did this out of loyalty, just to keep me on board for my sake.)

"This was long before the days of being able to just go on to the internet and see 300 red suits. I had to remember, or if I knew a designer well I could call them and say, 'Remember that suit you did in navy last season, could you make it in red?'"


Tagged in