Season Five of The Crown debuts this month, covering the ’90s-era decline of the marriage between Princess Diana and Prince Charles as well as, arguably, the most influential fashion era of Diana’s life. For each of the ten episodes, we will recap the fashion of the show, focusing in particular on Diana and her obsession with offering messages and stories through her clothes, with digressions on the Duchess of Windsor, the late Queen, and other royal style icons portrayed on the series. Read the recap of episode one here.
Last episode, we talked about how The Crown has a sort of bizarre commitment to sartorial accuracy that, dazzling in its unflinching accuracy though it may be, doesn’t adhere to the Princess’s own philosophy of style. But the opening Diana look of episode two—“The System”—shows us our girl as we know her well: looking a little bit too great for the circumstances. She’s attending a funeral in a black collarless jacket with gold buttons, looking fabulously sad. But perhaps she is simply a woman who knew how to look good while feeling bad. Or maybe: the better she looked, the worse she was feeling. You could never say Diana didn’t use every tool at her disposal to win our hearts.
Episode two covers Diana’s first attempts to take the matter of her public image into her own hands. Desperate for the rest of the world outside her royal bubble to understand how difficult life inside the palace was, she secretly made tapes for journalist Andrew Morton, with her friend and physician James Colthurst serving as go-between. Diana’s scenes, then, mostly take place in her own apartment, and we see her mostly in the kind of rough-and-tumble sportswear ensembles she wore with sexy creativity in this era.
(There is just one scene of Diana making a public appearance which, like a glamorous gnat, repeats the same tonal missteps as the clothes first episode, with the added injury of an anachronism. Diana visits a children’s hospital in a red skirt suit, an impressively accurate recreation of a look from further into the mid-’90s, replicated down to the Dior Lady Bag, which didn’t even come out until 1995. And we’re supposed to be in 1991 or 1992. Ugh!)
We meet Diana and her lover as she sports an iconic 90s look: wearing a sweatshirt with a logo on it and eating yogurt out of a plastic container. Does it get more H.W. Bush administration than that?! And this is not just any sweatshirt, but the now-famous Harvard sweatshirt she wore while dodging the paparazzi on the streets of London in 1997, and which embodies Diana’s obsession American symbols of privilege and their distinctly un-British embrace of casual-ness. It represents her desire to have it both ways: entitled but relaxed, respectable but famous. Purists (of whom, I’m sure you have already guessed, I am one), may carp that the sweatshirt’s mock neck is a bit too blobby and the sleeves too puffy. But we take what we can get!
And indeed, Debicki-as-Diana as the sleek and preppy glamazon shines through. This episode is a treat for Diana fashion lovers, especially those who dote over images of her coming and going from the gym in sweatshirts and bike shorts, or wearing sweat suits and cowboy boots. As Diana considers whether or not she will make the tapes for Morton, we see her in a kelly green tennis sweater and white pleated skirt, reminiscent of the little sweater ensembles she adored by the defunct Escada diffusion line Mondi. (The only problem: the sweater appears to be…Kappa?! Oh well. I’m trying to be optimistic here, because in these trying times, a statuesque actress pretending to be a statuesque royal is one of the few pleasures we have!) We see the balloon sweatshirt (from a fundraiser for the British Lung Foundation) which she famously paired with jeans, cowboy boots, a blazer, and a baseball cap. There are more V-neck cable knits and a striped jersey sweater blazer—here’s a woman with passion for nautical flair!—and a printed chintz shift.
What was the story with these weird combinations, and her obsession with sweatshirts? In the 1980s, her fussy sweaters and sportswear combinations felt like an attachment to her youth, or a way to remind us just how young she was. (She was twenty when she married Charles.) But as she grew older, they felt more and more like a way for her to assert some sense of normalcy, an attachment to the “real world” out there where people wore things like sweatshirts, however ridiculously regal she ended up looking in them. She was a woman attempting to strategize, ready to push up her cable knit sleeves and work out every possible scenario. (As she murmurs into the tape recorder, she mulled over divorcing Charles and taking her sons abroad, but knew it wouldn’t be legal.) It’s the preppy clothes, like a sleeveless powder pink polo and the tennis sweaters, that seem to do the most talking here.
Even in her most relaxed and private life, Diana was somehow obsessively pulled together, which this episode could have pushed further but admirably hints at. Her styling choices could have an antic quality to them that suggested an heirloom quality of turmoil, like that Harvard sweatshirt, with his slovenly sense of privilege, or wearing the collar of her terry cloth robe high like a starched judicial collar, as Debicki does late in the episode (and Diana did herself). Her freaked casual style has its legacy in style icons like Leandra Medine and Chloë Sevigny (especially in the latter’s penchant for preppiness and her admirable understanding of how fantastic her legs are.) It’s an awesome talent, fashion-wise, to take things that look pretty normal and make them look almost unhinged. On most women, it’s what we call personal style. On Diana, it reads like a psychologist’s notepad.
This article has been updated.
Rachel Tashjian is the Fashion News Director at Harper’s Bazaar, working across print and digital platforms. Previously, she was GQ’s first fashion critic, and worked as deputy editor of GARAGE and as a writer at Vanity Fair. She has written for publications including Bookforum and Artforum, and is the creator of the invitation-only newsletter Opulent Tips.
