London — Princess Diana was known for her impeccable style in the 1980s and 1990s. It has been more than 20 years since her passing in 1997 and people are still trying to duplicate some of her most fashionable looks.
Diana wore a couple of dresses that are still memorable to this day.
One was the black velvet gown (named the Travolta dress) that she wore when she danced with John Travolta at a White House dinner in 1985.
Another iconic dress was her off-the-shoulder black “revenge dress” she wore the same night in 1994 that Prince Charles admitted to cheating on her in a tell-all documentary.
Another dress that Diana wore to a big event in 1996 that people certainly remember is her blue slip dress but it almost did not make it off the hanger because Prince William was very young at the time.
In 1994, Diana sent tongues wagging when she showed up at a Vanity Fair party wearing what we now know as the “revenge dress”.
“We called that ‘The Revenge Dress’ [because] she wore that the same evening Prince Charles confessed to his adultery with Camilla,” Kerry Taylor, whose company auctioned off 10 of Diana dresses, told Womanmagazine.co.uk (per Readers Digest).
“While some would have been like, ‘I can’t face it this evening’, Diana went out in that dress looking drop-dead gorgeous. She made a big statement right there.”
The Princess of Wales made another huge statement two years later when she showed up at the Met Gala in a sexy, lace-trimmed midnight blue slip dress by Christian Dior from John Galliano’s first couture collection.
The event was held a few months before her divorce from Prince Charles was finalised. But Diana almost did not wear the gown for a relatable reason. Even though it was lovely and Diana looked stunning in it, she was not sure if she should wear it as she did not want to embarrass the young William.
She was concerned what the teenager would think of his mother wearing the sexy number. As the Daily Mail noted, she thought it was “so racy, in fact, [she] very nearly didn’t wear the dress to New York’s Met Gala for fear Prince William, then 14, wouldn’t like it being so revealing”.
The Princess of Wales was concerned about what William thought because he had been upset at that time by the media circus that surrounded her prior to her divorce from Prince Charles.
The Sun noted that in the biography William And Harry, author Katie Nicholl spoke to William’s childhood friend Kitty Dimbleby, who revealed: “I do remember William being distracted by what was going on at home… there was a lot in the newspapers about Charles and Diana’s marriage being in trouble. William told me, ‘Papa never embarrasses me but Mummy sometimes does’.”
It was reported that William was also pretty angry with his mother following her bombshell Panorama interview in 1995 in which she spoke about her troubled marriage to Prince Charles and his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. Years later, he said that while he did not agree with her decision he had come to understand why she did it.
“I can understand having sometimes been in those situations, you feel incredibly desperate and it is very unfair that things are being said that are untrue,” he said. “The easiest thing to do is just to say or go to the media yourself. Open that door. [But] once you’ve opened it you can never close it again.” /TISG