
Diana, Princess of Wales has been turned into a Princess of Sales
The Independent
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 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'.
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'.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Khaleej Times
13 hours ago
- Khaleej Times
Top stars and directors head to Venice for high-powered 2025 festival
Hollywood stars, Oscar-winning directors, Asian heavyweights and European auteurs will vie for top honours at this year's stellar Venice Film Festival, all looking to make a splash at the start of the awards season. Running from August 27 to September 6, the 82nd edition of the world's oldest film festival will showcase a rich array of movies that spans psychological thrillers, art-house dramas, genre-bending experiments, documentaries, and buzzy studio-backed productions. Among the leading A-listers expected to walk the Venice Lido's red carpet are Julia Roberts, Emma Stone, George Clooney, Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Andrew Garfield, Oscar Isaac, Cate Blanchett and Amanda Seyfried. Netflix returns A who's-who of global directors will also be premiering their latest pictures at the 11-day event, including US filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow, Jim Jarmusch, Noah Baumbach and Benny Safdie, alongside top Europeans Yorgos Lanthimos, Paolo Sorrentino, and Laszlo Nemes, and Asia's Park Chan-wook and Shu Qi. Netflix, which skipped Venice last year, returns in full force in 2025 with a trio of headline-grabbing titles, including Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, a new take on the classic horror tale starring Isaac, Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth. Baumbach's comedy-drama Jay Kelly, starring Clooney, Adam Sandler and Laura Dern, is also in the main competition and on the Netflix slate, alongside the geopolitical thriller A House of Dynamite, with Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson, and directed by Bigelow, who won an Oscar in 2010 for The Hurt Locker. Venice fires the starting gun for the awards season, with films premiering on the Lido in the last four years collecting more than 90 Oscar nominations and winning almost 20, making it the place to be seen for actors, producers and directors alike. In the past nine editions of the Oscars, the award for Best Actress or Best Actor has gone eight times to the protagonists of films first seen in Venice, including Stone for her role in Poor Things in 2024. Stone returns to Venice this year, teaming up again with Poor Things director Lanthimos in an offbeat satire, Bugonia. One film that looks certain to raise emotions is Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab, which uses original emergency service recordings to tell the story of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in Gaza in 2024 after being trapped for hours in a vehicle targeted by Israeli forces. "I think it is one of the films that will make the greatest impression, and hopefully (won't be) controversial," said the festival's artistic director, Alberto Barbera, his voice trembling as he recalled the movie.


Gulf Today
a day ago
- Gulf Today
Hunter curses out Clooney for pushing dad out of race
John Bowden, The Independent Scandal-plagued former first son Hunter Biden ripped into actor George Clooney in a foul-mouthed tirade aired Monday. The 55-year-old son of former President Joe Biden went on an expletive-filled rant against the Hollywood megastar in an interview with Andrew Callaghan, an independent journalist and former host of the podcast, All Gas No Brakes. He railed against the Goodnight, and Good Luck auteur's demand that Joe Biden drop out of the 2024 presidential race, which the younger Biden and others in the family's inner circle have made clear they believe is to blame for the Democratic Party's loss to Donald Trump. But he also took aim at Clooney's acting chops, suggesting hurt feelings were at play. "What do you have to do with anything? Hunter Biden seethed about the ER star. "Why do I have to listen to you? What right do you have to step on a man who's given 52 years of his life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full page ad in the New York Times to undermine the president at a time in which, by the way, what do people care about the most?" Biden claimed that the division within the Democratic Party led to Republicans having an insurmountable advantage ahead of November. He also claimed that the disastrous performance of his father at his one and only debate with Trump was due to his father taking Ambien in order to sleep on foreign trips. "I know exactly what happened in that debate. He flew around the world, basically mileage that he could have flown around the world three times, he's 81 years old, he's tired as s---, they give him Ambien to be able to sleep, he's gets up on the stage and he looks like he's a deer in the headlights," Hunter told Callaghan, adding: "(I)t feeds into every story that anybody wants to tell." Of Clooney's acting, he said of the From Dusk Till Dawn star: "I agree with Quentin Tarantino. George Clooney is not a actor. He is like... I don't know what he is. He's a brand." Biden's rant was nearly duplicated in a second podcast appearance — this time, a conversation with Jaime Harrison, former chair of the Democratic Party. Even here, Biden told the At Our Table host he didn't give a "s***" about Clooney's political opinions. "We lost the last election because we did not remain loyal to the leader of the party," he said during that appearance. "That's my position. We had the advantage of incumbency, we had the advantage of an incredibly successful administration, and the Democratic Party literally melted down." His father's performance at a June presidential debate with Donald Trump alarmed voters on all sides of the political spectrum and drew immediate fears from Democrats that the party was preparing to hand the election over to Republicans. Clooney was a prominent part of that avalanche, penning an op-ed for the New York Times titled, "I Love Joe Biden, But We Need a New Nominee". Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, said that internal polling conducted by the Biden campaign showed the former president losing by a landslide were he to remain in the race. The elder Biden dropped out of the race a month later, after an agonizing few weeks of calls for him to step down by backbencher Democrats and the less-than-delicate hinting from the likes of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others seemingly urging the same. Kamala Harris, his vice president and running mate, ascended to the top of the ticked after party officials shot down the idea of a last-minute primary election playing out at the Democratic National Convention. Democrats had already blown their own chance to hold a real primary earlier in the year. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, was drafted as her running mate after a short candidate search.


UAE Moments
a day ago
- UAE Moments
Read Your Daily Chinese Horoscope July 23rd, 2025⭐
Chinese zodiac, or shengxiao (/shnng-sshyao/ 'born resembling'), unlike the general zodiac, is represented by 12 zodiac animals. In order, they are the Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Pig. OX DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 If an argument can't be resolved, all parties involved will end up losing. Navigate around all obstacles and gracefully bow out of confrontational situations today. Stay out of the fray. SHEEP DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 Be cautious today and avoid making assumptions or dabbling in extremes of behavior. When feeling stressed, you can turn to a loved one for a surprising amount of help. RAT DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 Everything today would go flawlessly if it weren't for the other people in your life! But since nobody is an island, keep your wits about you as you go through the day. SNAKE DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 Your kind of charm can get you anything you want today, so use it or lose it! Go big and go bold. Fire away with requests, because people will be jumping to help you out. DRAGON DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 When dealing with today's challenges, you have vision and speed. Success will come, and you'll find yourself achieving much as long as you manage your time and attention carefully. TIGER DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 Don't shy away from offers and requests from others if they will better your situation. Concern yourself with self-improvement today and you'll receive the help of many. RABBIT DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 It's the little things that count. There could be a lot of small triumphs, but that's enough to keep you motivated and moving. Know that there's also a possibility of a surprise on the horizon. HORSE DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 If you can't reach a compromise, act with class and take care of your needs as best you can. Don't feel bad about not backing down. Do what's right for you, but be kind to others in the process. MONKEY DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 Things will work out best for you today if you consider a fresh approach. Perhaps tear it down and recreate the entire thing from scratch. You've learned from your mistakes. ROOSTER DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 You're trying to be helpful, but the person on the receiving end may not agree. Be sensitive to their mood and needs today. If they don't ask for help, keep your opinions to yourself. More: How The Fall Equinox Will Impact Your Zodiac Sign DOG DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 It's hard to break an old habit, but don't give up working on it. Take control of your life and change what's within your power to change. There's always a chance to do things differently. PIG DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 23, 2025 Take advantage of the day's energy. Focusing on what you're good at will get the best results. Don't be afraid to take on a new challenge. Others will respond to your ambition and drive.