When the Lord Chancellor announced Prince Charles’s engagement to Lady Diana Spencer on 24 February 1981, American Vogue promptly commissioned a table laying out the betrotheds’ “cars, clubs, income [and] endearing mannerisms.” Charles, readers learned in the May 1981 issue, loved Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn’s works on the Gulag, was nicknamed Action Man and Golden Eagle, counted Verdi as his favorite composer (with a particular fondness for La Traviata), and habitually wore both Turnbull & Asser shirts and Penhaligon’s cologne. Diana, on the other hand, was fanatical about Not the Nine O’Clock News, known to her friends as “Shy Di,” and was given to “endearing sideways glances”.
The starkest difference between the two, however, was their romantic history. Historian Andrew Barrow listed out 23 of the 32-year-old Charles’s former paramours for Vogue, including Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, Anna “Whiplash” Wallace, and Diana’s sister Lady Sarah Spencer. Precisely no one, however, was name-checked as a former love interest for the 19-year-old Diana, who had been selected as the royal bride in no small part because of Buckingham Palace’s insistence that Charles marry a virgin. The Queen Mother, in particular, felt the “sweetness and modesty” of “the Spencer girl” made her an ideal candidate for the role of Princess of Wales.
Diana was a startlingly cosseted teenager in the Jilly Cooper age, a waif whose most notable academic achievements included the Palmer Cup for Pets’ Corner at Sevenoaks (she was devoted to her guinea pig, Peanuts), and who kept a toy frog on the hood of her Mini Metro, a reminder that she would one day meet her prince. It’s difficult to blame the much more experienced Charles for struggling to perceive her as a serious life partner—“She is exquisitely pretty, a perfect poppet… but she is a child,” he reportedly said during their all-too-brief courtship—and her air of girlish innocence was only emphasized by her clothes.
Prior to her engagement, it was Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, who selected her wardrobe for her, which meant she frequently wore dowdy garden-party hats from milliner John Boyd and blousy, floral dresses courtesy of Donald Campbell. It would be British Vogue who came to Diana’s sartorial aid—particularly its fashion editor, Anna Harvey. “The first time I met Lady Diana Spencer was in 1980, in the editor’s office,” Harvey recalled in a tribute in the October 1997 issue. “Her sisters had worked at Vogue, and we thought we might be able to help with her image. I’d called in far too many clothes because I had absolutely no idea of the kind of thing she liked. By the time she arrived, I was shaking like a leaf, but I took one look at her and thought, This isn’t going to be too difficult after all.”
