How "The Crown" Dealt With Diana's Revenge Dress

The Crown truly doesn’t understand why or how women wear clothes.

Season Five of The Crown debuts this month, covering the ’90s-era decline of the marriage between Princess Diana and Prince Charles as well as, arguably, the most influential fashion era of Diana’s life. For each of the ten episodes, we will recap the fashion of the show, focusing in particular on Diana and her obsession with offering messages and stories through her clothes, with digressions on the Duchess of Windsor, the late Queen, and other royal style icons portrayed on the series. Read the recaps of episodes one, two, three, and four.

If you’ve gotten this far in The Crown—we’re now on episode five—you know that this season is by no means a pro-Diana document. Prince Charles, who has had a famously rocky reputation, is portrayed by one of the world’s most handsome actors as a decisive, proto-woke guy who just happens to be married to the wrong woman. But episode five takes this to an extreme that will be especially confounding to millennial and Gen Z audiences who’ve grown up holding Diana as a woman perennially wronged.

Here, Prince Charles is a renegade who doesn’t think the monarchy is modernizing quickly enough. He gives an interview in which he infamously reveals that he cheated on Diana, but the episode instead plays up the enlightened view on religion he shared. And his chemistry with Camilla is so homey and intimate that you can’t help but sort of love them. (Somehow, Peter Morgan has made the tampongate scene…endearing?)

At the end of the episode, he’s shown talking to a magically multicultural crowd of young Britons, telling them he knows what it’s like to be an outsider and that’s why he founded the Prince’s Trust, a charitable organization to aid disadvantaged children. The credits roll and tell us all about the Prince’s Trust in between footage of—oh dear, I wish I were kidding—Prince Charles breakdancing with Prince’s Trust beneficiaries.

Forget worrying about whether or not The Crown is fiction; why in the world is a Netflix show doing PR spin for the British monarchy?

Diana, on the other hand…has no lines.

Of course, Diana didn’t always need language to tell us how she felt—she had CLOTHES! Her role in this episode is boiled down to her most infamous look of all: the Revenge Dress.

Princess Diana has worn a lot of famous clothes: The midnight blue velvet Victor Edelstein dress she wore while dancing with John Travolta at the White House; the accidentally-sheer skirt she was photographed in shortly after she was introduced to the world as Charles’s girlfriend; and the Harvard sweatshirt and bike shorts, to name just a few. But in internet times, when history is constantly being rewritten as reappraisals of women wronged, her most famous look has become the the black Christina Stambolian cocktail dress she wore to a gala at the Serpentine Gallery on the evening that Charles gave his interview confirming that he did not cheat on Diana “until [their marriage] became irretrievably broken down.”

The interview could have been a massive embarrassment for the Princess, but instead she seized the moment and put on an extraordinarily elegant but clingy off-the-shoulder black dress with an asymmetrical hem and a little chiffon train that followed her like a flirtatious swirl of smoke. She looked radiant, wearing a pearl choker and a diamond bracelet and striding forward with her nails painted red to shake hands with the party’s hosts. Diana reportedly had purchased the dress several years before, and only decided to wear it that night after the look she’d originally planned to appear in was leaked. What makes it so excellent is its elegance; the chiffon fabric, the asymmetrical hem, the little sleeves. With its decolletage- baring bodice—it plunges deeply in the front in addition to revealing the wearer’s shoulders—it’s sexy, but it’s a jaguar purr rather than a roar. As a fashion statement of retaliation, it’s flawlessly sophisticated. There’s nothing low or petty about it.

On The Crown, the dress is well executed, as a nearly line-for-line copy. But the show’s treatment of the dress feels wrong, even misogynist. Diana watches Charles’s interview and weeps, then charges over to her hanging rack and fingers a number of garment bags. Her eyes are fixed in determination as her royal dresser clasps her pearl choker, and she steels herself in the back of the town car, preparing to reveal herself to the world. As she does so, we hear the press reports as voiceovers saying that by the next day, the dress was being characterized as her “Revenge Dress.” It comes off as a silly and small tool of defiance, rather than the glorious act of female vanity that it was.

Making the choice to wear that particular outfit on that particular day requires a certain brazen kind of interiority, and in truth, the show isn’t quite camp enough to understand it. It makes one wonder if the problem isn’t whether the show can hew close enough to the truth, but whether it’s creative enough to get at the fundamental truths of being a woman scorned.

Rachel Tashjian is the Fashion News Director at Harper’s Bazaar, working across print and digital platforms. Previously, she was GQ’s first fashion critic, and worked as deputy editor of GARAGE and as a writer at Vanity Fair. She has written for publications including Bookforum and Artforum, and is the creator of the invitation-only newsletter Opulent Tips.

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