Diana: Queen of Style review – ‘England’s biggest punk’? I think not

Maybe we’ll have to go through this every generation now – another thing to add to the list, along with sex and drugs, that any cohort coming into its majority thinks it has invented anew.

Talking of tiresome, we turn to Channel 4’s 49-minute-long documentary Diana: Queen of Style.

Perhaps the makers had – for reasons known only to themselves – wanted to keep drag star Bimini Bon Boulash’s standalone, decontextualised assertion that “Diana was the biggest punk to come out of England” in the programme, and therefore had to reduce everyone to a similar level of imbecility so it didn’t stick out too much.

Diana was also, we are informed, a pioneer of the #MeToo movement, because she didn’t do what the patriarchy wanted.

It had, its co-creator Elizabeth acknowledged, got a bit creased in there and, when she saw it, “My heart stopped for a minute.” But it’s OK now because – as they did with Diana, you see – people loved the imperfection, and Elizabeth now thinks it “reflected what happened later”.

“When we had,” he says reverently, before pausing and all but laying a hand over his immaculately clad breast, “the privilege of being asked to design for a royal tour, we wrote ourselves a very precise brief.” The brief in question was to distil into each outfit a tribute to both the country being visited and to Diana’s own England.

Of course there is a story to be told about Diana’s clothes and, at times, the programme tried to tell it, before getting submerged beneath a tide of nonsense about how she was this, that and the other, plus everything and to all people, all the time and now to people born after she died.

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