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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 underwear and 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”.
She was always the member of the [royal] family that was a consumer, just like the rest of us
Edward White, author of ‘Dianaworld’
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”.
The Eighties and Nineties marked “the beginning of the fast fashion era”, too, White notes, so for the first time, the public could shop like a princess. On a royal visit to Virginia in the 1980s, White says, Diana bought an $8 silk scarf from a JCPenney department store. “Within 24 hours, they sold out of all those scarves.” Her style was accessible in a way that the wardrobes of previous generations of royals never were. As White puts it, “Princess Margaret didn’t go into Debenhams and just buy stuff off the peg, you know?”
What’s especially striking is how Diana’s style still has just as much, if not more, selling power than it did during her lifetime. A few months before her wedding, she was photographed wearing a red jumper adorned with white sheep – and one solitary black one. Forty years later, the “black sheep” knit has won over a new generation of fans. In 2020, US label Rowing Blazers partnered with Warm & Wonderful to re-release the jumper, along with a reproduction of another iconic Diana knit, her pastel-hued Gyles & George knit bearing the slogan “I am a luxury few can afford” (the Gyles in question is in fact former Tory MP Gyles Brandreth). The first batch of sheep jumpers, priced at $295, sold out in 24 hours; in their first 18 months on sale, the repros made $8m (£5.9m), according to Town & Country.
When an exhibition devoted to Diana opened in Las Vegas in 2022, versions of the sweater were on sale in the gift shop, “as though they were official Diana merchandise”, White writes. The following year, the original was auctioned at Sotheby’s for a record $1.1m, making it the most valuable sweater ever. Its many afterlives are a textbook example of the Diana industry in action. But the knit also encapsulates how the people’s princess could imbue everyday items with a kind of legend too; surely the fact that the “black sheep” motif ended up foreshadowing her reputation as a royal outsider made it more irresistible.
It’s far from the only piece of Diana’s wardrobe that has commanded an astronomical amount of money at auction. “Is there a photograph of Diana with the item or wearing the item?” says Martin Nolan, co-founder and executive director of Julien’s Auctions, the LA auction house that is set to host the largest ever sale of Diana’s clothes this summer. “Then that’s the money shot right there, because that’s the connection.” Items that tell a story tend to prove particularly popular, too. Among the “higher priced items in the auction list” this time around is a Bellville Sassoon floral dress known as the “caring dress”, with an estimated value between $200,000 and $300,000. It was her go-to outfit for visiting children in hospital thanks to its bold, kid-friendly patterns and colours, a piece that burnishes Diana’s reputation for affability and openness.
Nolan is keen to stress, too, that “you don’t have to have a million dollars to show up at the auction”; there are “documents and handwritten cards” with an estimated value between $800 and $1,200.
For some Diana fans, acquiring something that their idol actually touched or wore isn’t just a way of owning a piece of history – it has almost religious overtones, White reckons. “It’s back to the consumerist thing of people feeling like there’s some kind of magic contained in some of these objects,” he says. “With a couple of people I spoke to – I don’t want to tar everybody with the same brush – it’s bordering on feeling like you’ve got a bit of the Turin shroud.” It’s fascinating to him “that we have this very strong relationship to Diana through physical objects. It’s quite Catholic.”
It makes sense, then, that many still embark on their own Diana-related pilgrimages, to the palaces and stately homes associated with the princess’s memory, and to more morbid sites. Althorp, the Spencer family’s ancestral seat and Diana’s burial place, still attracts plenty of visitors when it opens during the summer months. “It’s not as popular as it used to be in terms of [people] going to that site purposefully because Diana [grew up] there, but it still does get many thousands of tourists each year,” says Beverley Boden, associate dean at Teesside University International Business School and a researcher in dark tourism, the practice of visiting sites associated with death and tragedy.
If journeying to Althorp to respectfully observe the island on the Oval Lake where Diana is buried is the more acceptable end of the dark tourism spectrum, then you might see visiting the actual site of her fatal car crash as occupying the other, more dubious side. “Instantly, the Pont de l’Alma [bridge], where the incident happened in Paris, became this shrine, and even today is still [a site of] memorial,” Boden says. The motivation is jumbled; part rubber-necking, part genuine attempt to reckon with mortality and life’s brevity. Pilgrimages like this are difficult to commercialise, although not for want of trying. One 1998 article from BBC News details how in 1998, just one year after Diana’s death, one French hotel caused outrage by offering a “Diana Tour” recreating the princess’s final journey through Paris. “For a little extra, tourists can take a macabre drive in a Mercedes, similar to the one in which Diana was a rear seat passenger,” the piece claims.
It’s the sort of tale that makes you question the entire Diana industry. I read that old article with a sense of horror, judging anyone and everyone involved – but am I simply engaging in a different kind of morbid tourism when I watch dramas and read books about the princess, or admire her outfits in photos taken by the paparazzi who hounded her? For the most part, though, aside from such blatantly distasteful cash grabs, White reckons that the merchandise, the collectibles and the trips are simply a way that people can “practice their sincere feelings for Diana”: they are “sincere expressions of affection and connection”, which can say something “quite profound about the effect she had on a lot of ordinary people”.
Our collective obsession with Diana, and with finding new ways to explore (and exploit) her image looks set to endure down the centuries, White believes. “When William is on the throne, the association is going to be there, as it will be with George,” he says. William’s estrangement from Harry, he adds, is “like a church schism” between “two factions who are arguing about what Diana’s true legacy is”, which will “keep her in the public consciousness” (indeed, every new piece of speculation about the brothers’ fractured relationship seems to come with the subtext: what would Diana think?).
White has a theory, too, that “what really endures in the modern world when we think about royalty are the high stakes stories of women”. Take our collective fascination with Henry VIII’s six wives, “in high culture and in pop culture” – we are still fixated on these “politically and socially prominent” women, who took risks, lived “soap opera lives” and sometimes paid a high price for doing so. “If we’re still obsessed with Anne Boleyn 500 years after her death,” he says, “there’s every chance that people are going to find new things in [Diana’s story]”.
‘Dianaworld’ by Edward White is published by Allen Lane, £25. Bidding for Princess Diana’s Style and A Royal Collection at Julien’s Auctions opens on 19 May and closes on 26 June
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