Princess Diana was a "proud ambassador of British fashion".
The curator of the new exhibition ‘Diana: A Fashion Story at Kensington Palace’, Eleri Lynn, says the late royal – who tragically lost her life in 1997, when she was involved in a fatal car crash in Paris at the age of 36 – was once hailed the "Sun Princess of Versailles" by Italian-born French fashion designer Pierre Cardin when she visited the Palace of Versailles in the French capital three years prior to hear death in 1994,
Lynn old PEOPLE magazine: "[She] was really well received.
"The couturier Pierre Cardin was at the event and said ‘We are at Versailles, the home of the Sun King, and now we have the Sun Princess of Versailles.’ Diana was a very proud ambassador of British fashion."
Lynn previously shared how Diana used to refuse to wear a hat.
The late royal – the mother of Prince William and Prince Harry and former wife of Prince Charles – put loads of thought into her outfits and told her staff that she didn’t want a hat and gloves when she paid visits to children because she couldn’t "cuddle" with the accessory and liked to hold hands with people.
She said: "She often wore the same happy floral dress for hospital visits (memorable from a 1991 visit to a Sao Paulo shelter for abandoned children, many of whom were suffering from AIDS)… She called it her caring dress. You’ll notice she is not wearing gloves. That’s a royal protocol that she ditched because she liked to hold hands with people and make skin-to-skin contact. The original sketch came with a hat, but she didn’t wear a hat because she said, ‘You can’t cuddle a child in a hat.’ "
‘Diana: Her Fashion Story’ was commissioned to commemorate Diana’s life on the 20th anniversary of her death in August 1997, at which time she left her now-grown-up sons Prince William and Harry without a mother.
Princess Diana was a ‘proud ambassador of British fashion’
