Before she was a princess, Lady Diana Spencer experienced a moment straight out of a Hollywood movie. Just days before her engagement to Prince Charles was announced, she stepped into a luxury London department store and turned heads, but for all the wrong reasons.
In a scene straight out of the 1990 Julia Roberts film Pretty Woman, Diana and her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, entered London’s Bellville Sassoon studio to purchase an outfit for the future princess to wear at her first official photocall. However, their shopping excursion didn’t go as planned.
According to The Daily Mail, which interviewed Sassoon in 2017, Diana, 19, and Shand Kydd were reportedly turned away from the store. Their experience followed the same pattern as Roberts’ character Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman when she tried to purchase a fancy outfit in the film.
“The studio’s imperious French vendeuse was less than impressed by a teenage girl turning up late on Friday afternoon, nervously fingering clothes that were too sophisticated and probably far outside her budget,” the paper wrote. “She suggested ‘madam’ might find something more suitable around the corner at Harrods. So Diana fled.”
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The passage continued, “When David [Sassoon] and Belinda [Bellville] heard from another assistant that the girl had looked a bit like Lady Diana Spencer – the one who was in all the papers – ‘we nearly had a fit’. Luckily for them, Diana might have been scared off, but her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, was made of sterner stuff.”
What did Princess Diana wear the day her engagement to Prince Charles was announced?
On the day Princess Diana and Prince Charles announced their engagement, Diana faced the cameras in a cobalt blue skirt suit from Harrods, the same store she was directed to visit by the Belville Sassoon salesperson.
British label Cojana made the outfit. Diana added a white-and-blue print blouse with a bow at the neck, white stockings, black kitten heels, and a black leather clutch for her first official royal portraits reported Town & Country.
Diana would eventually return to the Bellville Sassoon shop, but no longer worked with the saleswoman who initially turned her away. The Daily Mail reported that Diana and Frances Shand Kydd ultimately purchased her wedding trousseau from the designers.
Diana and Prince Charles married in July 1981. Diana later purchased a blue sailor suit from Sassoon to wear for her first official portrait with Queen Elizabeth in 1981.
The couple was married for 15 years, until their divorce on August 28, 1996. During their union, they welcomed two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.
Princess Diana died in August 1997. She was 36 years old.