Diana, Princess of Wales has been turned into a Princess of Sales

Katie Rosseinsky, 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”.