Latest news with #Dianaworld
Daily Mirror
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Harry and William 'arguing over royal plan' - yet one move could fix everything
If Princess Diana were alive she'd have dragged her warring sons together to resolve their differences, says the Edward White, the author of a new book exploring her enduring legacy - especially with Gen Z Although it's been 27 years since Princess Diana died, her grip on the public imagination grows stronger with every year that passes as Gen Z teens and twenty-somethings become the latest devotees to fall under her spell. Many see her complicated, emotional personality living on in Prince Harry, who recently made headlines with a BBC interview in which he said, 'I would love reconciliation with my family'. It certainly begs the question of how Diana would have responded to the enduring tensions between her sons. 'Doubtless, she'd have been horrified,' says author Edward White, who has explored her enduring appeal in his new book Dianaworld. 'But her sons are arguing about what their mother's true legacy is. Diana said that she was trying to raise a future king that would ensure the monarchy survived into the 21st century – and William is trying to do a Diana reboot of the monarchy, combining the best of his mother and his grandmother.' But the other faction of Diana-ists could say that Harry is the real defender of her true legacy. 'There's something about Diana that encourages people to read whatever they want to read into her. The way people can look at Diana as embodying totally differing sides of an argument even applies to her sons,' he says. But Edward is confident that Diana would have got the brothers in the same room to thrash out their differences. And, though he considers Diana and Meghan to be 'extremely different people', he believes that Diana would have warmed to her daughter-in-law. 'Meghan has this preternatural force to advance herself, she's got strategies and plans. With Diana, it was all improvised and haphazard. But I think if Diana felt that Meghan made her son happy, she'd have been well disposed towards her. And Meghan and the two children seem to have brought Harry much more happiness than being a member of the Royal Family did.' It has been almost three decades since Diana's untimely death left a gaping hole in the lives of her loved ones. But her legend endures online – and Edward says it's not so surprising that Diana is a poster girl for fans who weren't even born in her lifetime. 'The internet is drenched in Diana,' he says. 'The way she would talk about her mental fragilities, her problems with eating disorders, the struggle she had after her children were born… She was a trailblazer, and the godmother of a younger generation who talk about their interior lives a lot. "And she would cry in public. Even before she got married, there were a couple of instances where she was crying in front of photographers. This was astonishing at the time. She also emerged at a point when there was lots of new technology, like VHS and VCR, so there are videos and documentaries about her.' This footage all plays out online, where Diana is also a posthumous influencer and style icon. 'She liked experimenting with the way she looked so there are loads of Instagram accounts set up to document her looks – 'Diana's revenge looks', 'Diana's lesbian looks', 'Diana's sporty looks'. There are loads of Instagram accounts because there are so many paparazzi photographs of Diana.' But perhaps there's a more fundamental reason for her enduring legend. 'Her story is astonishing,' says Edward. 'You couldn't write a more extraordinary melodrama.' Edward, who was 15 when Diana died, is by no means an obsessive fan. But, when lockdown struck, he felt that the national atmosphere echoed the mourning period that followed her death, and he began to research Dianaworld. How did the Diana who emerged from his deep dive differ from his initial perception of who she was? 'She was probably funnier,' he says. 'Almost everybody says she's very smiley. The word giggly comes up all the time in books about Diana. But she made people laugh. She had quite a sharp sense of humour. That's surprising because in public, she's completely sincere about everything. But in private, she was able to laugh at herself. She had more irony and self awareness than sometimes we give her credit for. 'It's difficult to meet anybody who met her and had a bad word to say about her. People just instantly liked her. She had amazingly good social skills, she seemed to be very, very likeable, and I think sincerely cared about people. So there's a huge amount to like about her.' He found her contradictions fascinating. 'She's got this incredible mixture of being bashful, and being unbelievably bold to the point of sheer recklessness. She seemed to think that if she wasn't taking the most extreme course of action to remedy a problem, then she wasn't actually taking any action at all.' He gives an example of her legendary Panorama interview, where she secretly smuggled a TV crew into Kensington Palace and spoke with unprecedented candour about her personal life. 'I think she came to regret that because it caused upset and aggravation and genuine hurt to people around her. Supposedly Prince William in particular was very upset by it.' Diana's instinctive impulse to speak her mind made her the Royal Family 's worst nightmare. 'She was only 19 when she got engaged to Prince Charles and she wasn't a worldly 19-year-old at all. So it came as a shock to her. To this day, the monarchy rests on twin principles of secrecy and deference. But her approach to being a royal paid no heed to secrecy or deference. 'Everything was on the surface with Diana. It was like it was impossible for her to not communicate what she was thinking or feeling, even when she was saying nothing. The newspaper coverage of her from the early Eighties has so much discussion about her facial expressions. Everybody was convinced they could tell what she was trying to tell them with the tilt of her head or those big expressive eyes.' Poignantly, in the last year of her life, Diana was exploring what the rest of her life might look like, and how she could channel her extraordinary public profile. 'There was a suggestion that she'd used Mohamed Al Fayed 's money to open an international chain of hospices. So I suppose she was inching towards something that Prince Harry tried to do with the Invictus Games – those globe-trotting, jet-setting, international philanthropy projects.' It's difficult, Edward says, to generalise about who Diana was. 'She was a very complicated figure. She was quite a capricious person. And she changed a lot during the 15 years that she was in the Royal Family. 'But she became aware of and valued her personal agency. By the end of her life, her guiding precept was that she was no longer a Spencer or a Windsor or a princess, really – she was Diana.'
Gulf Today
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Diana, Princess of Wales has been turned into a Princess of Sales
Katie Rosseinsky, The Independent In November 1995, Princess Diana sat down opposite the journalist Martin Bashir in her Kensington Palace apartment to film the now-notorious Panorama interview. Buried amid the better-known sound bites about Charles, Camilla and wanting to be 'a queen of people's hearts' was a sharp insight about Diana's status as one of the most famous women in the world. 'You see yourself as a good product that sits on a shelf and sells well, and people make a lot of money out of you,' she told Bashir. Perhaps it's no surprise that Diana had a pretty good grasp of just how marketable a 'product' she could be. After all, this is the woman whose sisters brushed off her pre-wedding jitters by declaring: 'Your face is on the tea towels, so you're too late to chicken out now.' But her remark was also deeply prescient. Because if Diana was a 'good product' back then, that status has certainly increased in the 27 years since her tragic death. In 2025, the Diana industry is booming, although it's hard to put an exact number on it, because it is so sprawling and diffuse. She's ubiquitous in pop culture, thanks to the prestige melodrama of Netflix's The Crown, biopics ranging from camp (2013's Diana, starring Naomi Watts) to arthouse (2021's Spencer), endless documentaries and even a much-derided stage musical. Her gowns command hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. Archive photos documenting her off-duty attire have become a favourite fashion reference point for Gen Z; it doesn't take much digging to find reproductions of some of her Nineties sweatshirts on platforms like Etsy and Vinted. Her style has also been the subject of sellout exhibitions at Kensington Palace, where she spoke to Bashir, and where she was often deeply unhappy. In the gift shop there, she appears on books and on tea cups; on the Historic Royal Palaces website, you'll find jewellery inspired by her sapphire engagement ring and the Spencer tiara. These are only some of the more straightforward ways that Diana's image has been marketed to her public. In his new book Dianaworld, a wide-ranging cultural history of the former Princess of Wales, author Edward White interrogates Diana's many cultural and commercial afterlives. Dianaworld teems with striking, odd anecdotes that will be irresistible to anyone with an eye for Diana-related ephemera. Did you know, for example, that in 2010, a Chinese lingerie brand launched a 'Diana' line, with an advert starring a lookalike wearing a tiara, smiling beneficently at a small child and playing the cello? Or that, for almost 25 years, visitors to a funeral home near Birmingham were greeted by a granite rendering of the princess? The reasons for Diana's enduring appeal — and marketability — have been endlessly enumerated in the years since 1997. There was her ability to connect and empathise with ordinary people, as well as 'the extraordinary glamour that surrounds her, and the tragic nature of her death', as White puts it. He also points out, though, that there's a certain logic to the way that she's been commercialised, because she was always 'very much a consumerist princess', he says. 'And by that, I mean she was associated with lots of brands from the beginning'. One anecdote sums this up. 'When she was getting ready on the morning of the wedding, she just started singing the jingle from the Cornetto adverts,' White says, referring to the 'Just one Cornetto' song, belted out operatically by a faux Italian gondolier in the ice cream commercials of the Eighties and Nineties. This moment of exuberant silliness 'really struck a chord', he says, so much so that the story was rehashed in news articles and books, becoming part of her mythology, as if proof of her common touch. In Tina Brown's wonderfully gossipy 2007 biography The Diana Chronicles, for example, the former Vanity Fair editor has Diana 'burst[ing] into a joyous singalong' as her bridal gown is lowered over her, with 'dressers and bridesmaids joining in'. It's a reminder that the royal bride-to-be was very young, but also that she was fully immersed in the material world of ads, commercial telly and mass-market ice cream. 'She was always the member of the (royal) family that was a consumer, just like the rest of us,' White says. This reputation persists in tales of the princess encouraging her sons to enjoy fast food — at the end of biopic Spencer, we see Stewart's Diana heading to KFC with a young William and Harry, though in real life she preferred McDonald's. The public could also 'consume Diana in a way that we'd never been able to consume any member of the royal family before', White says, because 'she arrived at this moment where there (was) quite a lot of new technology, including colour photography'. Newspapers could fill their colour supplements with snaps of the princess, and a handful of magazines, like the still-running Majesty, were launched that were 'dedicated to big, high definition colour photographs of the royal family'. Acquiring images of Diana was, of course, an extremely lucrative industry, buoyed by huge interest from the public; photographers nicknamed her 'the Princess of Sales'. The rising popularity of VHS meant that her subjects could watch their favourite royal's big moments again and again, from the comfort of their own home. When White was researching his book, he found 'an advert for a documentary that was being made around the time of the wedding, that was going to go on sale for some ludicrously expensive price'. It was hard to tell from the ad whether 'half the [video] tape was empty, or there was a second tape that came with it'. The general idea, though, was that the proud owner could enjoy the doc, then record the TV broadcast of the ceremony afterwards, to 'custom make [their] own memory of the day'. A strangely lo-fi memento but one that shows how products encouraged and allowed us to 'develop this personal relationship with Diana'.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Princess Diana Insisted That Prince William and Prince Harry Forego This Royal Tradition
A new royal book, Dianaworld, chronicles Princess Diana's insistence that her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, attend Eton College, as the men in her family had. By sending her sons to Eton, Diana bucked royal tradition of sending the men in the family to Gordonstoun in Scotland, where Prince Charles attended. A similar debate is reportedly occurring about whether to send Prince George to Eton or to Marlborough College (where Kate Middleton attended) when he changes schools in Diana was groundbreaking for the royal family in many ways—for starters, the way she parented and the way she wasn't afraid to show her emotions in public. Perhaps nowhere is her enduring legacy still felt on the royal family more than the way she parented, which—not an overstatement—truly broke the mold for royal parenting. It can be seen in the way that both of her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, parent their own children up to the present day. As the 'Eton versus Marlborough' debate rages on about where the Prince and Princess of Wales' eldest child, Prince George, will attend school next year, a new book looks back at how Diana bucked royal tradition when it came to where to send William and Harry to school. In Dianaworld: An Obsession (which came out April 29), author Edward White shares that Diana 'insisted' that William and Harry be educated differently than their father Prince Charles and grandfather Prince Philip had been. 'Once her sons were born, she was firmly of the mind that her responsibility was to shape them as new types of Windsors, providing a new style of kingship,' White wrote (via Marie Claire). William and Harry's educational future was 'something that occupied the attentions of rather a lot of people in the late eighties and early nineties,' White continued—not unlike George's future is capturing the royal zeitgeist today. When William and Harry ultimately attended Eton College, it was a tradition-breaking move, as Charles and Philip, as well as Charles' brothers Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, all attended Gordonstoun in Scotland. To put it mildly, Charles had a miserable time at Gordonstoun, but even still wanted his own sons to be educated there. But Diana 'rejected all these suggestions' for her sons 'and insisted the boys be sent to board at Eton College,' White wrote. In the Princess of Wales' mind, 'the Englishness that Diana wanted to install in her children was aristocratic rather than royal.' After all, Eton was where the men of Diana's family, the Spencers, attended—her father and only brother both were Etonians (as were 20 British prime ministers). 'When Diana spoke of raising princes who were in touch with 'the man on the street,' she meant by making them more like the men in her family,' White added. When William and Harry enrolled at Eton—William becoming the first senior royal and future monarch to be educated at the school—White wrote that Diana made 'her sons more typical of the English upper classes than her ex-husband [Charles] has ever been.' Diana's edict won out, and now it remains to be seen whether George will follow in the Eton tradition, or buck it and start a new tradition of his own at Marlborough (which is his mother's alma mater). Read the original article on InStyle
Spectator
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Whether adored or despised, Princess Diana is never forgotten
What happened to the condolence books? They swiftly multiplied, that mad week in September 1997. The original four at St James's Palace had to be increased to more than 40. People queued for hours and often spent many minutes composing their contributions. That's not even to mention the thousands of similar books organised by councils, embassies and private businesses. The official set were 'offered' to the Spencer family. Perhaps they are at Althorp. Edward White's Dianaworld, about the phenomenon of the former Princess of Wales, shows an indefatigable resourcefulness. It is not really about the woman herself but about the effect she had on people who never laid eyes on her. White has drawn the line at reading the lachrymose, often crapulous, outpourings in the condolence books – and who can blame him? But he has unearthed contemporary commentary from Spare Rib, the Faversham News, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and countless other publications. These are extremely illuminating, often evincing views that were quickly suppressed after the Princess's death. I was pleased to be reminded of the widespread horror in early 1997 at how vulgar Diana's wardrobe had become. Anne de Courcy, observing the white jeans, pumps and gold jewellery, lamented the 'Sharonisation' of Diana. White is also conversant with the atrocious secondary literature. Even to read the titles in the seven-page bibliography is to feel soiled. (Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows.) Everyone except her good friends has written their memoirs – her protection officers, her bodyguard, her psychic healers, her press officers, her most caddish lovers. And, of course, her frightful butler. But there! I really neither know nor care For what the Dear Old Butler thought! In my opinion, butlers ought To know their place, and not to play The Old Retainer night and day! Dianaworld addresses many areas where the impact of the princess was clear, strange and quantifiable.
Telegraph
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why we're all still obsessed with Diana
At the centre of Edward White's Dianaworld is a woman the author labels 'the ubiquitous figuration of vitality, youth and love': Diana, Princess of Wales. It's the sort of claim made of 'miracle' beauty products and, 28 years after Diana's death, it will – like hifalutin skincare – work only for some of White's readers. Yet for all its asininity, his description accurately captures something of the phenomenon of the woman once destined to be Britain's queen consort: her ability to exist simultaneously as individual and symbol, her extraordinary facility for embodying the myriad fantasies of millions across the globe. Dianaworld explores a handful of those fantasies. It's a compendium of the ongoing impacts on both popular culture and private reverie of this aristocratic Cinderella who married her Prince Charming and then, with his assistance, ruthlessly, painfully and very publicly dismantled the fairy tale. White describes Dianaworld as concerned with 'the layers of mythology' that, following Lady Diana Spencer's engagement to the then-Prince of Wales in February 1981, adhered to her; it's also about the people who shaped, embraced or succumbed to those mythologies, as some continue to do. Foremost among these agents was Diana herself, in whom the author identifies a strain of steely but directionless ambition. Dianaworld examines its protagonist's mythomania alongside the 'Diana' constructs of diverse communities, from the tabloid press – which, White suggests, responded to Diana with an 'unmistakable mixture of lasciviousness and archaic deference' – to the Pakistani women who, in 1995, concluded that the princess's relationship with the British-Pakistani surgeon Hasnat Khan showed that Diana 'was one of us… she was doing what every Asian daughter was meant to do: marrying an Asian doctor.' White's story, therefore, as he explains, is as much about the Princess's people as the People's Princess. As a consequence, this is a very odd book. It celebrates Diana's achievement in convincing so many men and women that she was so many different things to each of them – an achievement that, following the breakdown in her marriage, was almost certainly deliberate – as well as the longevity of those interpretations. In some instances, quirky details beguile, such as the Diana robot doll that, available in Japanese supermarkets ahead of the Prince and Princess of Wales's visit in 1986, did much to popularise the princess among Japanese children. In other instances, one longs for White to engage more critically with the material in hand. He accepts, for example, apparently unquestioningly, the assertion of a stripper-turned-artist that her former career equips her to understand Diana's objectification and, as a consequence, create an insightful alternative iconography of Diana – before White parachutes the reader into a giddying half-peroration: 'Whether Diana was a convincing fraud or radically authentic are the distant poles between which her contested reputation still resides.' Nearly thirty years after Diana's death, the matter of her fraudulence or authenticity is no longer as pressing as it once seemed. For denizens of 'Dianaworld', and Dianaworld's intended audience, the conclusion is probably a given. Among the strengths of this book is its dissection of its subject's self-presentation. 'The profundity of the superficial has always been a key consideration of royalty, especially in the age of mass media,' White writes, plausibly suggesting that, for Diana, hair, makeup and clothing offered 'an elaborate semaphore, signalling to us everything which she didn't, or couldn't, say aloud'. Her appearance enabled her to communicate with the many millions who saw her photographs in newspapers and magazines, or who watched her on the television but never encountered her in the flesh. More than once, she ended a relationship with a hairdresser or fashion designer who questioned her choices: an indication, perhaps, that such decisions did not arise from caprice but were part of a considered plan. Once, with devastating effect, appearance and public statement worked in tandem, in the 1995 Panorama interview that Diana filmed in secret. White characterises Diana as 'a crossbench emblem', a public figure 'claimed by Left and Right, progressives and conservatives', and he notes – correctly – that what unites many Dianaphile communities is that 'all see in her a reflection of themselves'. This, he shows, is one explanation for Americans' Diana fervour. As a princess who took her children to theme parks and McDonald's (albeit not as often as Americans may wish to believe), who wore baseball caps and gym kit, Diana 'remind[ed] everyday Americans of their own lives, conforming to and endorsing their own experiences and expectations'. For similar reasons, White argues, Diana attained iconic status among gay communities: the 'activism, allyship, calling out and stepping up' of Diana's later years 'is ingrained within the idea of minority identity'. This is not a biography of Diana, Princess of Wales, nor is it for the most part concerned to offer an assessment of her long-term influence on Britain's monarchy, the institution that first provided her with a public platform. Perhaps it will only be possible to measure Diana's lasting influence once her elder son succeeds her ex-husband as king. In the meantime, White's deft sidestepping provides its own answer. While Diana lives on as a conceptualised Disney princess-cum-domestic martyr, the Royal family continue to go about their business – with less of the glitzy fanfaronade of the 1980s, certainly, but also less of the turbulence of the 1990s. Time and again, Diana's inconsistencies and occasional cruelties notwithstanding, what emerges from White's ziggurat of anecdote and press cuttings is what her former private secretary and equerry Patrick Jephson called her 'quality of forgivability'. Dianaworld may spoil lively storytelling with awful flashes of cod-academic register – Diana's 'iconicity', her occupation of a 'liminal cultural space' – but it offers valuable insights, too, including that of the lesbian socialist in Edinburgh who concluded that what the Princess appeared to sanction was the possibility of 'celebrating the anti-hero in all of us'.
