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Shy Di
Diana’s looks as a young Princess
were feminine and innocent, a stark
contrast to the sleeker, sophisti-
cated style she would later adoptLady in red
In Spencer, Diana’s selection of this
bold red coat and hat acts a meta-
phor for the way she is chafing at the
highly controlled aspects of royal lifeThe people’s Princess
Diana’s post-HRH penchant for
mixing high and low fashion—
like this blazer, sweatpants and
baseball cap—made her glamour
feel relatableFASHION
Behind the styles
Princess Diana spent half her life
in the public eye, no stranger to
the power of presentation: her
royal wardrobe functioned as both
diplomacy and armor. But fashion, as
seen in Kristen Stewart’s costumes in
Spencer and in real life, also served
as a way for Diana to reclaim her
narrative, especially as she broke
away from the palace. —Cady LangIn our
imaginations,
Diana is
more alive
than ever,
an enigma
worthy of
explorationneed enemies.
Spencer is heavily engineered to
be one of those classy movies that
wins awards. But the song-and-dance
extravaganza Diana: The Musical is a
work Diana herself—known to be a fan
of spectacles like The Phantom of the
Opera—would more likely warm to. The
show—with music and lyrics by David
Bryan and Joe DiPietro, and a book by
DiPietro—was set to open on Broadway
in spring 2020, before the pandemic
brought the curtain down. The live
show will finally go on as planned this
November, but there’s a filmed version
of the production available to watch
right now, on Netflix.
Is Diana: The Musical any good?
Not exactly. The early numbers, es-
pecially—during the part of the show
that details the meeting and courtship
of the young Diana and her Prince-to-
be—are bright, cheerful and chirpy.
The show’s star, Jeanna de Waal, bursts
onto the stage with a peppy-Princess
number about being under-
estimated, which just hap-
pens to be called “Under-
estimated”: “Your prison has
been built/ your downfall’s
been devised/ Won’t they
be surprised/ when you’re
underestimated?”
The whole thing feels a bit
self-helpy, cheerleaderish. But
in a strange way, Diana: The
Musical—an effervescently pro-Diana en-
tertainment that also acknowledges how
much the young Diana craved the spot-
light, only to be burned by it—is a more
honest work than Spencer. There’s noth-
ing arty or arch about it; you can imagine
Diana herself humming the songs, tick-
led to see her own reflection in them, and
pleased as punch that she could inspire a
Broadway show. Who wouldn’t like that
kind of fame, rendered in a sweet, harm-
less form— especially Diana, who was
first made famous by photographers and
then, years later, almost literally hounded
to death by them? A Broadway musical,
even a silly one, isn’t the worst memorial
for a woman who came to be known as the
People’s Princess.Yet of all these recent portrayals,
it’s Emma Corrin’s, in the fourth
season of Netflix’s fiction-based-on-fact drama The Crown, that comes
closest to capturing Diana’s opalescent
mystery. Corrin’s Diana first appears as
a schoolgirl dressed as a tree sprite for
a student production of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. Charles (Josh O’Connor)
has come to the family home, Althorp,
to pick up her older sister Sarah for a
date; he spies the young Diana sneaking
around in her tights, an awkwardly
gamine adolescent who’s trying not to
be seen—and yet clearly, desperately,
wants to be seen, especially by a
real-life Prince.
This scene is marvelous for the way
it asks—without necessarily answering:
Had Diana been scheming, from a young
age, her way into the royal palace?
And then comes the kicker: So what
if she had? It’s common for young
girls to yearn for fame, to dream of
being acknowledged as charming and
beautiful, to want to be seen. Corrin,
so mischievous and flirty in those early
scenes, helps us see that ambition in
the very young Diana. But
we also see how, just a few
years later, that delight gives
way to a particularly cruel
disillusionment. In The Crown,
days before the royal wedding,
Diana discovers that her
fiancé has recently designed
a gold bracelet as a “farewell”
gift for his not-really-an-ex,
the married Camilla Parker
Bowles. (Though The Crown is fictional,
this anecdote is essentially factual.)
The future Princess sees she has been
betrayed; she wants to back out of the
marriage, but it’s too late.
The Crown shows the stricken bride
in that puffy meringue of a wedding
dress. Corrin’s Diana looks so very
small; as seen here, that dress—at the
time a sighworthy symbol of fairy-tale
fantasy—may as well be a white wolf
eating her alive. Young Diana Spencer
got the prize she thought she wanted,
and when she realized how hollow it
was, she reinvented herself to fit into
her strange, unhappy surroundings—
and then reinvented herself again to get
out. No wonder we have no idea who
she really was; she died on her way to
becoming that person, leaving behind a
jumble of puzzle pieces that will never
DIANA: GETTY IMAGES (3); SPENCER: NEON (3) be an easy fit. □