When the Lord Chancellor announced Prince Charles’ engagement to Lady Diane Spencer February 24, 1981, American Vogue quickly commissioned a painting featuring the engaged couple’s “cars, clubs, incomes (and) endearing manners.” Charles, as readers learned in the May 1981 issue, loved the Gulag works of Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, was nicknamed Action Man and Golden Eagle, considered Verdi his favorite composer (with a particular fondness for La Traviata), and usually wore both Turnbull & Asser shirts and Penhaligon cologne. Diana, on the other hand, was fanatical about Not the nine o’clock newsknown to her friends as “Shy Di”, and received “endearing side glances”.

The most striking difference between the two, however, lies in their romantic history. Historian Andrew Barrow has listed 23 of 32-year-old Charles’ former lovers for Vogueincluding Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, Anna “Whiplash” Wallace and Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah Spencer. However, no one has been identified as a former lover of Diana, 19, who was chosen as a royal bride largely because of Buckingham Palace’s insistence that Charles marry a virgin. The Queen Mother, in particular, felt that the “gentleness and modesty” of “the Spencer girl” made her an ideal candidate for the role of Princess of Wales.

Diana was a surprisingly pampered teenager in the Jilly Cooper age, a derelict whose most notable academic achievements included the Palmer Cup for Pets’ Corner in Sevenoaks (she was devoted to her guinea pig, Peanuts), and who kept a toy frog on the bonnet of her Mini Metro, a reminder that one day she will meet her prince. It’s hard to blame the much more experienced Charles for having difficulty perceiving her as a serious life partner: “She is exquisitely beautiful, a perfect doll… but she is a child,” reportedly – he declared during their all-too-brief courtship. her air of girlish innocence was only emphasized by her clothes.

Before her engagement, it was Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, who chose her wardrobe, which meant she frequently wore old-fashioned garden party hats by milliner John Boyd and floral blouse dresses. offered by Donald Campbell. It would be British Vogue who came to Diana’s sartorial aid, particularly her fashion editor, Anna Harvey. “The first time I met Lady Diana Spencer was in 1980, in the editorial office,” Harvey recalled in a tribute in the October 1997 issue. “Her sisters worked at Vogueand we thought maybe we could help him with his image. I had called way too many clothes because I had absolutely no idea what kind of things she liked. By the time she arrived, I was shaking like a leaf, but I looked at her and thought: It won’t be too difficult after all.”