AngloFiles TGIF: A Not-So-Demure Debut for Princess Diana

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A Royal Engagement: Lady Diana’s Debut and the Dress that Launched Her

“Wait till you get an eyeful of this.”

It was a far from typical greeting that Charles, Prince of Wales, gave the waiting crowd of oglers and photographers as he unfolded from his car in the dusk of March 9, 1981, outside London’s palatial Goldsmiths’ Hall. Then again, the occasion was a far from typical evening, even for the heir to England’s throne. The “eyeful” in question, shyly emerging after him, was Charles’s new fiancée, “Shy Di” Spencer. The event, a black-tie benefit for the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, was their first official date as a soon-to-be-married couple.

A recitation of poetry by Princess Grace of Monaco, the ethereal former actress known as Grace Kelly, provided the evening’s nominal attraction. A more intimate dinner at Buckingham Palace was to follow. But what the crowd outside and flush opera lovers inside truly hankered for was a close-up of the 19-year-old ingénue, descendant of kings, who had captured the world’s imagination.

Upstaging even the future princess herself was the dress she wore. In a departure from the woolens and Wellies for which she was better known, willowy Di wore a dramatic black taffeta gown that exposed much of her rosy English bodice and, thanks to the way she bent to exit the car, much of her cleavage.

When she straightened, gasps of awe issued from the sidelines. Flashbulbs surrounded her in a fiery ring of scrutiny. Inwardly, Diana withered, but she did her best to face the glare, offering greetings and demure smiles throughout the event – a glittering promise of England’s royal future. A darker prophesy, though, would come later that evening, in Di’s lone moment alone with Princess Grace.

Still, the mood was light as the royal couple entered the reception hall, Charles chuckling at the hubbub over his betrothed’s outfit. “Have all the fashion writers finished?” asked the Prince Royal.

“Oh, no, Sir,” he might have been warned. “They have only just begun.”

The Scene: Why You Wish You’d Been There

Since 1327, by royal appointment, the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths has regulated England’s craft and trading in gold. Its City of London headquarters provided a suitably grand setting for a fundraiser-recital headlined by Princess Grace, for which some 300 guests had paid the equivalent of $110 each.

With Diana, the question of what she wore only later became a matter of whom she wore. On this night, her dress came from a married pair of couturiers known chiefly to a small coterie of titled ladies, Elizabeth and David Emanuel. Diana had only recently asked them to create her wedding gown.

“When the engagement was announced, what we saw was a demure Sloane Ranger, all pie-crust collars, floral skirts and cardigans,” David Emanuel later told the Daily Mail of his most famous client. So, when Diana breezed into their studio just a few days before the Goldsmiths gala — too late to tailor a dress — she may have surprised the designers by selecting a strapless black number off the rack, never mind its being a size or two too small.

When she almost fell out of it on unfolding from the car, “It knocked the Budget off the front page of every newspaper,” Elizabeth Emanuel drily recalled.

For jewels, Diana wore diamonds– heavy pendant earrings and a necklace – borrowed from her mother, Lady Shand Kidd. Prince Charles wore a pink rose boutonniere, not that anyone noticed.

Throughout the evening, Diana’s guileless spontaneity garnered almost as much notice as her dress, biographer Kitty Kelley recounts. Sitting so still for the program of music and readings, had given her “pins and needles in her bottom,” Diana confessed at the reception. Wine on her evening gloves prompted a giggle and a remark about “nipping round” to the cleaners next day.

At the palace later on, she continued to charm reporters and guests, who were equally dazzled by her engagement ring, a six-carat sapphire surrounded by 18 diamonds. She let the women ogle it, permitted a young man to kiss her hand (“You’ll never live this down,” she teased), and complained coquettishly of “too many formal dinners” at her new Buckingham Palace digs.

Things began to get out of hand, though, as a progressively tightening scrum grew around her. It was with a sense of relief that Diana would be pulled away for a fateful encounter with her idol, Grace of Monaco.

The Scene: Why You’re Glad You Missed It

The awed reception outside Goldsmiths was actually not the first shock occasioned by The Dress.

Soon after the announcement of her engagement on February 3, Diana had been relocated to the royal residence and left mostly to her own devices in a quiet suite off a long corridor, often dining solo. It was a lonely time for a naturally chummy girl who knew no one at the palace and was beginning to harbor vague suspicions about her fiancé’s “friendship” with Lady Camilla Parker-Bowles.

Diana was therefore happily anticipating a rare few hours with her betrothed when she swirled into his study like an excited schoolgirl that afternoon to show off her get-up. Charles’s first response was silence. Then, “Royals only wear black for funerals.”

Change, he instructed. There was nothing to be done for it, replied Diana, stung. She had no back-up, so she must wear the dress or skip the gala.

Given this start to the evening and Diana’s shaky confidence overall, it wasn’t surprising that she was nearing nervous collapse by the time Grace, sensing her distress, pulled her into a Buckingham Palace ladies’ lounge. Gwen Robyns, Grace’s aide, was with them; she later described how Diana began to unburden herself onto the understanding princess while touching up her make-up in the mirror.

“Her breasts were on display and she was quite a wreck,” said Robyns. Lamenting the too-small dress, the relentless paparazzi, and the total loss of her privacy, Diana burst into tears. Grace responded sympathetically, recounted Majesty magazine, folding an arm about her. Then “she cupped Diana’s face in her hands. ‘Don’t worry, dear,’ she said with a gentle smile. ‘You see, it‘ll only get worse.’”

Diana remembered the debut as “a horrendous occasion.”

The Aftermath

Later that spring, Diana was asked by a friendly matron presented to her at a garden party if she was enjoying her engagement. “Oh, no!” she responded readily, according to New York Magazine, “I absolutely hate the engagement. But I shall adore being married to Charles.”

She was wrong, of course. By the eve of her July 29 wedding, with 2,500 guests descending, an anticipated television audience of millions, and England awash in “royal wedding” tchotchkes, Diana was awash in doubt. Maybe she could back out, she suggested in a huddle with her sisters, Jane and Sarah.

“Too late, Duch,” they cheerfully replied, using a family nickname, “Your face is already on the tea towels.”

How many of those tea towels must have outlasted the marriage. The Waleses’ wouldn’t be the only pairing to fail. Elizabeth and David Emanuel, creators of the fairy tale gown and veil, split in 1990.

And the former Grace Kelly, who had stoically survived alcoholism, her daughters’ catastrophic romances, and her own husband’s philandering, died in an auto accident in September, 1982, less than two years after meeting the future English princess. Diana alone represented the royal family at her funeral.

SOURCES

Daily Mail Weekend Magazine, July 29, 2006

The Royals, by Kitty Kelley

Royalty magazine, “What Grace Told Diana”

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Author Info -  AngloFiles publisher Mandy Katz also writes for the New York Times and Moment magazine. Read more from this author

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